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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

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MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



A GROUP OF 
ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 



OF THE 



EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 



J5Y 
Pi/ 

Cr T. WINCHESTER 



PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
IN WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 



Nefo gorfc 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1910 

All rights reserved 



Copyright, 1910, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1910. 



Nortxrooti IPress 

J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



©CLA256084 



Co 

MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE 

OSCAR KUHNS 



The following papers pretend to no discovery of 
new biographical fact, nor to any reversals of estab- 
lished critical verdict. They are, for the most part, 
the result of many pleasant hours in a college semi- 
nary room; and their interest, if any interest they 
have, is that attending the informal discussion of a 
group of familiar and delightful English prose-writers. 

If a disproportionate attention seems given in these 
pages to biography rather than to criticism, it should 
be remembered that Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, 
Wilson, and Hunt all found their themes within their 
own personal experience. Perhaps no other body 
of English prose, equally large and important, is 
so exclusively autobiographical. The biographical 
method of approach, always useful, is here the only 
one open to the critic. He must first know the man 
before he can estimate the book. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



The New Essay — Jeffrey as Critic i 

William Hazlitt 26 

Charles Lamb 76 

Thomas De Quincey 118 

John Wilson 166 

Leigh Hunt 204 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH 
ESSAYISTS 

THE NEW ESSAY — JEFFREY AS CRITIC 

I 

Very different literary forms have been designated 
by the common name Essay. In strictness, it is 
to Montaigne that we owe the name and the thing. 
His Essais, excellently translated by John Florio in 
1583, were at once popular in England, and Bacon, 
fourteen years later, borrowed their title for his 
famous little bundles of apothegm. The influence 
of the Essais, continuing into the next century, in- 
creased with the liking for all things French after 
the Restoration, and is attested by Cotton's new 
translation in 1680. They evidently furnished the 
model for those charming discursive papers by 
Cowley, Halifax, and Temple, which closely resemble 
some of the best work of Hazlitt or Lamb. 

But the sudden and immense popularity of the 
Taller and Spectator in the Queen Anne time brought 
into prominence another type of the essay. It is 
the peculiar praise of Addison that he knew how 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

to give permanent charm to the familiar, even to the 
trivial, by nicety of literary skill. His manner is 
simple, yet always easy and urbane. He had noth- 
ing of importance to say; but he could say it with a 
suavity, humor, and grace that make the veriest 
nothings admirable. He was no philosopher, no 
statesman, and a very mediocre critic, but his little 
papers on a fan or a petticoat, on the foibles of Sir 
Roger or the vanity of Ned Softly, may last as long 
as the Paradise Lost, and very probably find more 
readers. 

For more than half a century, the acknowledged 
mastery of Addison tended to popularize this lit- 
erary form in which he had won such success. 
Before the close of the century there had appeared 
more than a hundred periodicals, — most of them 
as short-lived as the flies of a summer, — which at- 
tempted to do what had been done so brilliantly 
in the Tatler and the Spectator. But they all failed. 
The essay of the Addisonian type demands the skill 
of an Addison. It lost its distinctive charm even in 
the treatment of Goldsmith ; and it becomes a solid, 
clumsy thing under the ponderous handling of John- 
son in the Rambler and Idler. Before the close of 
the century its form was outgrown; the modern 
essay has a quite different origin. 

For two hundred years, indeed, many excellent 
prose papers of moderate length, wTitten upon 



THE NEW ESSAY 

weighty themes, political, philosophical, and crit- 
ical, had appeared as prefaces, letters, pamphlets, 
and short treatises; but it was the new Reviews and 
Magazines, founded at the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century, that produced the modern essay. 
Now, for the first time, we have that extended dis- 
cussion of some one theme, popular in manner yet 
accurate in statement, and admitting high literary 
finish to which we now confine the name of essay. 
The founding of the Edinburgh Review in 1802, not 
only introduced to the public a new group of young 
liberal writers, it introduced a new type of writing, 
a type adapted to a wide range of subjects, giving 
expression to the author's personality, and affording 
scope for almost any kind of rhetorical excellence. 

The Edinburgh had, indeed, been preceded by a 
number of so-called Reviews; 1 of which all but two 
were short-lived and of no influence. These two, 
however, the Monthly Review, founded in 1749, 
and the Critical Review, in 1756, were already of 
quite venerable age. Though they contained little 
but book-notices, for half a century they had been 
rival pretenders to the realm of English criticism. 
By looking over the correspondence of Fanny Burney 

1 The London Review, 1775-1780; A New Review, 1782-1786; 
the English Review, 1 783-1 796; the Analytical Review, 1788- 
1799. 

3 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

or of Cowper, one may see how their verdicts were 
dreaded by young or timorous authors. The 
Monthly Review was conducted by that redoubtable 
Philistine, Ralph Griffiths, who starved and bullied 
Goldsmith, and furnished security for the poet's 
gay clothing at the price of four articles for the 
Review. Most of Griffiths' criticism, however, was 
written by feebler men, poor-devil authors whose 
opinions were always at his dictation. He paid them 
at the rate of two guineas a sheet of sixteen pages, 
and as their idea of a review was eight pages of quo- 
tation to one of criticism, they can hardly be said 
to have been underpaid. To the reader of to-day 
their writing seems so empty that we wonder how it 
could have been deemed a misfortune to be damned 
by such ignorant judges. On the appearance of 
Gray's Elegy the critic of the Monthly ventures 
only the opinion that "the excellence of this little 
poem may compensate for its lack of quantity. " The 
Bentley edition, two years later, moved him to enthu- 
siasm by the "head and tail pieces with which each 
poem is adorned, which are of uncommon excellence, 
the Melancholy in particular being exquisite." Oc- 
casionally, and especially toward the close of the 
century, a new author is greeted with something like 
intelligent recognition. The Kilmarnock edition 
of Burns, for example, by some rare good luck, was 
reviewed by some one able to discern, under the 

4 



THE NEW ESSAY 

Scottish dialect, — which he calls disgusting, — the 
genius of a new kind of poet. But, as a rule, it is 
difficult to discern any relation between the approval 
of the critic and the quality of the work. And there 
is seldom anything to break the deadly dulness of 
the writing save the rather spirited comments which 
each editor now and then bestows upon the other. 
For they were always at loggerheads. " The Monthly 
Review,'' 1 said Griffiths, a year after the Critical 
was founded, "is not written by physicians without 
practice, authors without learning, men without 
decency, and gentlemen without manners. " Smollett, 
editor of the Critical, rejoined with similar urbanity: 
"The Critical Review is not written by a parcel of 
obscure hirelings under the restraint of a bookseller 
and his wife. The writers for the Critical are un- 
connected with booksellers and unawed by old 
women." 1 Making allowance for editorial heat, 
each Review seems to have characterized the other 
not very unfairly. 

With only these senile rivals in the field, the sudden 
and phenomenal success of the Edinburgh Review 
is no marvel. The familiar story of the meeting of 
those three eager but impecunious Edinburgh stu- 
dents, Sydney Smith, Brougham, and Jeffrey, when 
the Edinburgh Review was conceived, is a classic of 
literary history, and deserves to be. For the Edin- 

1 Forster's Life of Goldsmith, Book II, Ch. i. 

5 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

burgh was essentially a new thing. The idea seems 
to have been an unpremeditated suggestion of Syd- 
ney Smith's; there had been no happier literary 
inspiration since Richard Steele hit upon the plan of 
the Tatler, nor any more pregnant with results for 
our later prose literature. The three young enthu- 
siasts were scholars and gentlemen, and they took 
their Review out of Grub Street at once. At first, 
indeed, it was proposed that the writers of articles 
should have no remuneration at all; that "it should 
be," as the biographer of Jeffrey puts it, " all gentle- 
man and no pay." But this was thought to be a 
little too quixotic, and the wiser rule was adopted that 
all contributors should be required to take pay, and 
should be paid like gentlemen. The papers were to 
be much longer than those in the old Reviews ; and, 
while they still retained the form of a review of a 
book or books, instead of being a mere list of quota- 
tions with a little commonplace comment, they were 
animated discussions of important subjects of con- 
temporary interest, for which the books under notice 
served merely as a text. The writers evidently had 
opinions of their own: sometimes a little arrogant, 
sometimes a little shallow, but at all events not 
merely perfunctory ; and they knew how to set forth 
those opinions with the spirit and the style of gentle- 
men. In literary matters the new Review was 
thought brilliant and magisterial; and in politics, 

6 



THE NEW ESSAY 

at a time when conservatism was having everything 
its own way, these young men dared, if somewhat 
cautiously, to avow pronouncedly liberal opinions. 

It is true that the reader of to-day who turns over 
the early volumes of the Edinburgh runs the risk of 
finding the luminary not quite so brilliant as the ac- 
counts of its reception have led him to expect. There 
is certainly not so much dash and audacity in the 
opening numbers as one would suppose from the 
surprise and indignation they excited. The writers 
seem rather to assume a dignified assurance of 
manner. But any one who prepares himself by a 
short course of reading in what called itself criticism 
before 1800 will find the most homiletical passages 
of the Review " stick fiery off indeed." And it must 
be remembered that there is not much duller reading 
to be found on earth than that between the covers of 
any Review a century old, with its pother over ques- 
tions settled three generations ago, and over books 
and men alike gathered now to a forgotten past. 

It is a more serious charge against these early 
volumes of the Edinburgh and of the Quarterly 
Review, established in 1807, that they contain little 
or nothing of permanent value as literature. Yet 
this, too, was inevitable. Perhaps the -most im- 
portant service of the two Reviews was the intelli- 
gent guidance of opinion on public affairs. By 
far the larger number of the articles were on such 

7 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

subjects. But any periodical devoting its attention 
so largely to current political questions of the hour 
must be content to see most of its writing pass into 
that wallet wherein Time puts alms for oblivion. 
The article that is timely is seldom immortal. Only 
some unusual intensity, like Swift's, or some unusual 
philosophic vision like Burke's, can give to writing 
on such themes lasting value. And none of the early 
reviewers had either of these qualifications in any 
high degree. 

For the literary criticism, which occupied consider- 
able space in both Reviews, there is, perhaps, a little 
more to be said. The new Reviews doubtless did 
something to raise the quality of literary criticism. 
With their pretensions they could not afford to utter 
partial, hasty, ill-considered verdicts. Criticism 
was forced to justify its decisions, and to look about 
for some general principles. Doubtless nothing like 
a science of criticism was elaborated — it may be 
questioned whether there is any such a science ; but 
the Reviews at least demanded from the critic care- 
ful reading, instructed judgment, and some definite 
views as to the grounds of literary excellence. They 
were, as has been said, a kind of college of criticism. 
Yet much of the resulting work was either very com- 
monplace or very perverse. The Reviews certainly 
made some notorious mistakes. But critics, like the 
rest of us, are very fallible, and their worst mistakes 

8 



THE NEW ESSAY 

might be pardoned them if it could be shown that 
they had often introduced to public notice genius 
not yet recognized, or removed unworthy prejudice, 
or anticipated in any way the verdict of the next 
generation. But that the Reviews rendered any such 
service, between 1800 and 1825, is very doubtful. A 
careful reading of all the critical notices in the 
Edinburgh and Quarterly during these years will 
prove that they usually followed the public taste, 
occasionally opposed it, but never led it. They 
echoed the popular admiration for Scott and Byron ; 
but the other three great poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, 
and Keats, won recognition in spite of their neglect 
and abuse. Jeffrey's persistent attacks upon Words- 
worth are matter of familiar knowledge, and unques- 
tionably did something to retard the poet's fame; 
they set a fashion not yet quite outgrown. From 
18 1 5 to 1837 neither Review has anything to say of 
Wordsworth: having made up their verdict of con- 
demnation, they refuse to alter or even to repeat it. 
Everybody remembers that the Quarterly, "so savage 
and tartarly," had the blame of killing John Keats ; 
while the Edinburgh had no word of recognition for 
him, and only broke silence in 1820 when his brief 
career was closed. Shelley was abused by the 
Quarterly through three violent articles, and the cau- 
tious Edinburgh did not venture a word of him 
until 1824 — two years after he was dead. 

9 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Yet, after all, the most perverse literary criticism 
is not without value. It at least calls attention to 
the book. Probably the poet himself would rather 
be damned than ignored. And by the discussion of 
faults and merits, even by the opposition he pro- 
vokes, the critic does something to educate public 
taste; the collision of opposite opinions generates a 
kind of literary atmosphere and not infrequently 
evolves something like critical principles. Had it 
not been for the blind dogmatism of the Edinburgh, 
we might never have had Coleridge's Biographia 
Literaria. The criticism of the last hundred years, 
begun by these Reviews, has certainly done much to 
render public interest in literature more general and 
more intelligent, and thus to raise the standard of 
production. 

II 

It must be admitted that in all this early critical 
writing there are but very few papers that will find a 
place among English classics. Southey furnished 
to the Quarterly a body of solid and sensible prose 
writing, mostly on political subjects, and all of it 
now dusty and dead. Gifford, the editor of the 
Quarterly, was a dull-sighted, thick-skinned, heavy- 
handed critic, with little acumen and no delicacy, 
who richly deserved the flogging he got from Hazlitt. 
He liked to pose as a literary judge and executioner, 

10 



THE NEW ESSAY 

but he wrote comparatively little himself, and that 
little was never of much value. Of the Edinburgh 
men, Brougham, though a vigorous and careless 
writer, was never ambitious of literary repute. Syd- 
ney Smith was unsurpassed as a wit, raconteur, 
letter-writer; but his papers in the Edinburgh are 
mostly on ecclesiastical and political topics, and only 
two or three of them show him at his best. The critic 
among the reviewers was Francis Jeffrey. From 
1802 to about 1830 he was accounted beyond ques- 
tion the first of literary critics. As the century 
advanced, his fame declined. His obstinate and con- 
temptuous depreciation of Wordsworth was remem- 
bered against him when the poet had come to his own. 
There were a good many irreverent people of the 
later generation who thought his criticism, when 
not commonplace, merely smart. Yet as late as 
1867 Carlyle pronounced him "by no means supreme 
in criticism or in anything else ; but it is certain that 
no critic has appeared among us since worth naming 
beside him." And only the other day, in an able 
and discriminating study, Professor Gates * was pro- 
testing against the neglect of Jeffrey's good work in 
Jeffrey's own famous words "This will never do!" 

It is easy to understand Jeffrey's contemporary 
popularity. In the first place, he wrote a clear, 
rapid, fluent English. Doubtless he is sometimes 

1 Three Studies in Literature, 1899. 
II 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

too fluent and makes a little philosophy go a long 
way ; but his style has a metallic brilliancy, not un- 
like that of his admirer, Macaulay. He knows how 
to say telling things, and he has infinite store of illus- 
tration. Then, too, like Macaulay, he is always 
cock-sure — which is pleasing in a critic. His 
sweeping assertions, his lavish use of the super- 
lative and the unusual, give to his writing a magis- 
terial air that most readers find very satisfying. Pro- 
vided he agrees with us, — and Jeffrey never differed 
boldly with current opinion, — we like the critic to 
tell us authoritatively how we ought to feel about 
a book, and why we ought to feel so. We compli- 
ment ourselves on having reached substantially a 
sound judgment without his aid; and the loftier the 
critic, the greater the compliment of his agreement 
with us. 

Then Jeffrey's criticism has always a certain hard 
common sense. It is clear and sane, level to the com- 
prehension of everybody. There is nothing subtle 
in it. He never goes much below the surface, and 
cannot give you those penetrating glimpses that 
sometimes illuminate the whole of an author's work. 
He likes his meaning plain and his emotions familiar. 
Anything profound, mystical, or even strikingly 
original is likely to put him out. He emerges from 
the farther end of one of Wordsworth's long passages 
of transcendentalism blinking and angry. But the 

12 



THE NEW ESSAY 

large, obvious excellences of thought and feeling, 
which all men perceive, he can state and appraise 
with intelligence and justice. He is best, therefore, 
on such objective writers as Scott; best of all, I 
think, on books like Mrs. Hutchinson's Memoirs 
or Pepys' Diary, that present no problems, and 
invite narrative treatment with copious illustrative 
quotations. But even in his most unsympathetic 
reviews, like those on the Lake School, his opinions, 
however blind, have a plausibility that recommends 
them to average prosaic common sense. He is never 
perverse or paradoxical of set purpose. 

Jeffrey's method, unlike that of most recent critics, 
is dogmatic, never exactly what we have come to call 
impressionist. The modern critic strives to suggest 
the total effect upon himself of the work under re- 
view; to make you feel as the work has made him 
feel. He is the medium through which you are to 
be put en rapport with the author. Jeffrey's method 
is altogether different. He does not aim to give you 
an appreciation of the book, but an estimate of it. 
This is an intellectual process, a judicial process, the 
application of principles to reach a verdict. All 
Jeffrey's criticism is in this manner; he is always 
proving, expounding, defending. This method 
not only tends to conventional decisions, but it is 
unlikely to produce writing of the highest literary 
quality. For it does not appeal to our sympathy, 

13 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

but to our judgment ; and it gives to the critic little 
room for the play of imagination or the expression 
of his own personality. 

It is this method that determines the favorite form 
of Jeffrey's critical articles; for they are nearly all 
built on the same plan. They begin with an elabo- 
rate introduction, which often takes up about a third 
of the paper. This introduction is devoted either 
to a re'sume" of some period of literary history or to a 
statement of general principles on which his specific 
critical judgments are to be based ; then follows, for 
the rest of the paper, a detailed estimate of the book, 
usually with copious excerpts to illustrate and enforce 
the verdict. These introductions, when of the his- 
torical sort, are usually correct in their facts, but they 
are superficial and show little sense of the deeper re- 
lations of literature to history. For instance, the 
sketch of the course of English poetry that precedes 
the review of Ford's Dramatic Works is an interest- 
ing sketch of the elementary external facts of English 
literary history for two centuries; but it is almost 
entirely without those illuminating glimpses that 
prove keen critical insight, and it gives you no clear 
notion of the ways in which the changing national 
life embodies itself in literature. In the instance 
mentioned, as in some others, the first part of the 
essay seems to have little connection with the rest — 
the introduction does not introduce. Similar com- 

14 



THE NEW ESSAY 

ment might be made on the opening sections of 
the reviews of Campbell's English Poets and of 
Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Such passages are of 
interest as showing that Jeffrey had some dawn- 
ing conception of an historical method in criticism; 
but he hardly had more. And he seemed quite un- 
able to apply any such method to the literature of 
his own day. One would have thought, for ex- 
ample, that in the poetry of Byron and its wonderful 
vogue all over Europe, Jeffrey might have seen and 
pointed out some significant expression of the spirit 
of the age ; but it cannot be said that he ever did. 

The other kind of introduction, that is taken up 
with general critical principles, is often still more 
disappointing. For this formidable array of truths, 
which would seem to make the conclusion drawn 
from them quite irresistible, turns out on examination 
to be only the generalized expression of Francis 
Jeffrey's personal likes and dislikes, a set of high 
priori statements all out of his own head. He always 
assumes himself to be the representative of those 
instructed few who have authority on matters of 
taste, and he mistakes the limitations of his own ap- 
preciation for general laws. A good many critics, I 
am afraid, do that ; but Jeffrey shakes still more our 
confidence in the stability of his judgment, not merely 
by the jaunty facility with which he lays down gen- 
eral principles, but by his unlucky denial, now and 

i5 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

then, of some statement assumed as an eternal truth 
only a little while before. Thus, writing in April, 
1810, an elaborate review on the poetry of Crabbe, 
he declares that we are all "touched more deeply 
as well as more frequently in real life with the suffer- 
ings of peasants than of princes . . . and an effort 
to interest in the feelings of the humble and obscure 
will call forth more deep, more numerous, and more 
permanent emotions than can be excited by the for- 
tunes of princesses and heroes"; but four months 
later, having to explain the wonderful popularity of 
Scott, he decides that it is mostly due to his subject, 
and that "kings, warriors, knights, outlaws, min- 
strels, secluded damsels and true lovers" are the sort 
of persons to appeal to the general poetic sense. And 
his whole a priori explanation of the conditions of 
poetic popularity was, two years later, overset by the 
meteoric fame of Byron on quite different grounds. 
In the essay on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Jeffrey 
declares that "human nature is everywhere funda- 
mentally the same"; in the review of Baber's Me- 
moirs , two years later, he decides that there is "a 
natural and inherent difference in the character and 
temperament of the European and Asiatic races." 
One who goes straight through his essays will come 
upon a considerable number of such contradictions. 
Jeffrey's general principles we suspect are mostly 
made to order. He first makes up his decision upon 

16 



THE NEW ESSAY 

the work under review, quite empirically, and then 
frames a set of universal truths to justify his deci- 
sion. Mr. Leslie Stephen, indeed, goes so far as to 
say that Jeffrey had no real taste of his own at all, 
and is always asking himself, not "What do I feel?" 
but "What is the correct remark to make?" But 
this seems to me unfair. Jeffrey, I should rather 
say, is always asking himself "Why ought I to feel 
as I do?" He has a very genuine, though limited, 
appreciation, and is bent on justifying it. 

His various likes and dislikes are curious, and often 
apparently irreconcilable. Yet a little reflection 
will show how they all spring from a common ground 
of temperament. Jeffrey, if I understand him, was 
a singular combination — I can hardly say compound 
— of sense and sensibility. His emotions were easy 
to get at; but they were checked by anything im- 
probable, by any shock to his prosaic sense of fact. 
He sincerely professed enthusiastic admiration for 
the romantic literature of the sixteenth century, 
especially the Elizabethan drama, which, he says, 
"I have long worshipped with a kind of idolatrous 
veneration"; but for the romantic literature of his 
own day, he had a very qualified liking. Coleridge's 
Ancient Mariner seems always to have been to 
him nothing better than an old sailor's foolish yarn; 
of Christabel he says — or, at all events, allowed 
the Edinburgh to say, in a review always attributed 
c 17 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

to him — that " the thing is utterly destitute of value, 
a mixture of raving and drivelling . . . beneath 
criticism." His estimate of Scott was forced up 
by the pressure of public opinion; but of Marmion 
he could say, in 1808 : " We must remind our readers 
that we never entertained much partiality for this 
sort of composition, and ventured on a former occa- 
sion to regret that an author endowed with such 
talents should consume them in imitation of obsolete 
extravagances. . . . To write a modern romance 
of chivalry seems to be much such a phantasy as 
to build a modern abbey or an English pagoda." 
On the other hand, for the work of Crabbe, the most 
merciless of realists, he always had a great admira- 
tion. Here, he said, are the facts of life. These 
farmers and shopkeepers and workhouse folk are 
the real thing; they "represent the common people 
of England pretty much as they are" — not as Mr. 
Wordsworth's philosophical peddlers, and sententious 
leech-gatherers, and hysterical school masters. In a 
word, Jeffrey liked romanticism, — as he understood 
it, — and he liked realism ; but he did not like them 
mixed. The romantic writers, he would say, may 
fairly abandon the present and the actual; but to 
throw the hues of imagination on the facts of common 
life, as Wordsworth attempted to do, this was merely 
to falsify the facts without illuminating them. 
So, too, he objects to the conventional poetic dic- 
18 



THE NEW ESSAY 

tion of the eighteenth century on precisely the same 
grounds as Wordsworth in his famous preface, and 
sometimes in almost the same words. He praises 
Cowper without stint as the first to abandon that dic- 
tion and to break away from all rigid poetic conven- 
tion. Yet not the most finical classicist of the eigh- 
teenth century could have had greater dread of any- 
thing rude or undignified. Wordsworth's simplicity 
he accounts vulgar and puling; and he shudders 
politely over such very mild improprieties as the 
guard-room talk of the soldiers in the Lady of the 
Lake. One wonders how he would have survived a 
reading of — let us say — some of Rudyard Kip- 
ling's ballads. The one poet most entirely to his 
liking was Campbell, always proper and always 
sentimental. "We rejoice," he says, in opening his 
review of the Gertrude of Wyoming, "to see once 
more a polished and pathetic poem;" though he 
fears it may not appeal to the taste of an age 
"vitiated by babyishness" (i.e. of Wordsworth) "or 
antiquarism" (i.e. of Scott). In a famous passage 
in one of the very latest of his papers — quoted 
by everybody who has written anything on Jeffrey 
since Christopher North quoted it first in Blackwood 
— looking backward over a generation, he concludes 
that Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Crabbe, are already 
passing into oblivion; Scott's novels have put out 
his poetry; even the splendid strains of Moore are 

19 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

fading into distance and dimness, and the blazing 
star of Byron receding from its place of pride ; while 
the two poets who still keep the laurels fresh with no 
signs of fading are — Rogers and Campbell ! 

All of which proves, not that Jeffrey had no taste 
of his own, but that it was narrowed in its range, on 
the one hand by a hard common sense, and on the 
other by a rather prim sentimentality. It was his 
misfortune that, with his limited critical equipment, 
he had to deal with two or three very original poets, 
innovators who broke new paths for themselves. 
Of Shelley he never ventured any estimate at all. 
The great Edinburgh criticism of Shelley was written 
by Hazlitt. Byron for a time quite dazed him, as 
he dazed everybody. Before that overmastering 
genius, even Jeffrey's insistent common sense was 
blinded. He holds his breath over the magnilo- 
quence of Manfred, and avers that the dialogue 
which to so many of us now seems the veriest bathos is 
" so exquisitely managed that all sense of its impossi- 
bility is swallowed up in beauty." The worst fault 
of Manfred he declares to be, not that it is hollow and 
theatric, but that it "fatigues and overawes us with 
terror and sublimity." He has doubtless suffered 
most from his judgment of Wordsworth. Yet 
to-day the most enthusiastic Wordsworthian must 
admit that there is a good deal of solemn rubbish 

20 



THE NEW ESSAY 

in Wordsworth, and not a little puerility. Nobody 
is obliged to read the whole of the Excursion; while 
as for Goody Blake and Harry Gill, Alice Fell, 
Peter Bell, and some dozen or more of that family, 
no one need much care to save them from the jaws 
of devouring Time. Our quarrel with Jeffrey is 
that he is not content to say of the Excursion, as 
Bottom says of the play, "There are things in this 
that will never please," but he must go on to pick out 
for special reprobation some of the very best passages 
in the poem. So in his flings at Wordsworth's sim- 
plicity, scattered through various essays, — as those 
on Crabbe and on Burns, — he points his ridicule by 
mentioning just the verses dearest to the lovers of 
Wordsworth, as the Leech-Gatherer, the Matthew 
poems, Michael, and what he calls "the stuff about 
dancing daffodils." The truth is that to the prac- 
tical, mundane intelligence of Jeffrey all the most 
characteristic excellences of Wordsworth's poetry 
were quite invisible. Wordsworth's feeling of an 
all-pervading spiritual power in nature, his resulting 
conviction of the direct influence of nature upon 
character, his notion of the effect of the imagination 
on moral culture, — all this to Jeffrey was mere 
mystical nonsense. Wordsworth's subjective treat- 
ment of humble life, that, he thought, was a whim- 
sical falsification of fact. There were no such plain 
people. He could not see it was not the peasant that 

21 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

made the poem, but Wordsworth's thought about the 
peasant. Wordsworth's poetical theories may have 
been right or may have been wrong; but before he 
condemned them Jeffrey should have understood 
them. 

In briefest summary, then, we may admit that to 
Jeffrey, rather than to any other man, may be given 
the credit of raising the critical essay to the rank of a 
recognized literary form; that his writing is always 
brilliant and plausible; that his critical verdicts are 
always clear, and if upon matters within the range of 
his appreciation, sensible and just. On the other 
hand, it must also be admitted that his range of ap- 
preciation is limited; that his impressions are often 
worth more than the dogmas he invents to justify 
them; and that a considerable part of his fame was 
due to the immense and novel popularity of the Re- 
view which raised him for a time to literary dicta- 
torship almost like that of Dryden or Johnson. 



Ill 



But important as was the service of the two great 
Reviews in calling out a new variety of literature, the 
most entertaining prose written in England between 
1800 and 1825 is not to be found in their pages. The 
men whose work we have to consider in this volume 
contributed but little to the Reviews, and none of 

22 



THE NEW ESSAY 

their best. The reason is obvious. The Review 
did not invite that kind of writing out , of which 
the best literature is made. It was not essays 
they wanted, but extended reviews of contemporary 
questions, suggested by some current book or books. 
Within such limitations there was little opportunity 
for original and creative work, or even for that play 
of personal feeling, that intimate and subjective 
note, which so often gives to writing permanent liter- 
ary charm. The whimsical humors of Lamb, the 
causeries of Hazlitt, the rambling reminiscences of 
De Quincey, the jovial "Noctes" of Wilson, — they 
would each and all have been out of place in the dig- 
nified pages of the Edinburgh or Quarterly. More- 
over, both Reviews had provoked the most violent 
antagonism of some of the best contemporary writ- 
ers. Neither De Quincey nor Lamb could ever 
forgive the Edinburgh its vituperation of Words- 
worth and Coleridge, the gods of their early idolatry ; 
while to Hazlitt, the mere mention of GifTord and the 
Tory Quarterly was a red rag to set him roaring, 
and the Edinburgh, with its timid Whiggism and 
dread of all radicalism, seemed to him but little better. 
Much of the work of these men, therefore, found 
publication, not in the Reviews but in the new Maga- 
zines. The father of all English Magazines was the 
Gentleman's Magazine, founded by Edward Cave 
in 1 73 1, and followed before 1800 by several other 

23 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

periodicals of similar character. All these Maga- 
zines, however, as their name implied, were reposi- 
tories for miscellaneous matter — summaries of 
recent news with brief comment, excerpts from 
current literature or from rare or curious books, 
expositions of difficult or obscure passages in the 
classics or in Scripture, bits of odd and striking fact 
and incident. They afforded scanty room for origi- 
nal writing of any sort. Perhaps the most note- 
worthy contribution to them before 1800 was those 
famous reports of parliamentary debates written by 
Sam Johnson, mostly out of his own head. But in 
18 14 the New Monthly Magazine was established 
under the editorship of the poet Campbell; three 
years later appeared that more famous periodical, 
Blackwood's Magazine, which at once rivalled the 
Reviews in popularity and influence. In 182 1 the 
London Magazine was started by John Scott, — the 
brilliant young critic who fell in a duel next year, — 
with Charles Lamb announced as one of its prin- 
cipal contributors. These new Magazines were 
entirely unlike the dreary publications of that name 
in the preceding century. The new Reviews had 
vastly raised the character and repute of periodical 
writing; to write for them now brought fame with 
the public and hard cash from the publisher. This 
high standard the new Magazines maintained. They 
commanded the pens of the most brilliant and am- 

24 



THE NEW ESSAY 

bitious young men. Published not quarterly but 
monthly, they were fresher and more vigorous than 
the Reviews; open to good writing on all subjects, 
they invited papers more varied, original, imagina- 
tive, than could find admission to the Reviews. Un- 
der such encouragement we get a new type of essay. 
The essays of Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Lamb com- 
bine the personal, intimate charm of Addison's best 
work with a more highly elaborated form and a 
much wider range of interest. There is no type of 
literature more altogether delightful; and there are 
no better specimens of the type than in the work of 
the writers we have to consider in the following pages. 



25 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 



Any sketch of William Hazlitt may fitly begin 
with an extract from his most familiar essay — the 
most delightful essay of personal reminiscence in the 
English language. It is the story of his spiritual 
birth. 

" My father was a dissenting minister, at Wem, in 
Shropshire; and in the year 1798 (the figures that 
compose the date are to me like the ' dreaded name of 
Demogorgon') Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury 
to succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of a 
Unitarian congregation there. He did not come till 
late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to 
preach ; and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the 
coach in a state of anxiety and expectation, to look 
for the arrival of his successor, could find no one at 
all answering the description but a round-faced man, 
in a short black coat (like a shooting jacket) which 
hardly seemed to have been made for him, but who 
seemed to be talking at a great rate to his fellow- 
passengers. Mr. Rowe had scarce returned to give 

26 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

an account of his disappointment, when the round- 
faced man in black entered, and dissipated all doubts 
on the subject by beginning to talk. He did not cease 
while he stayed; nor has he since, that I know of. 
He held the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful 
suspense for three weeks that he remained there, 
'fluttering the proud Salopians like an eagle in a 
dove-cote,' and the Welsh mountains that skirt 
the horizon with their tempestuous confusion, agree 
to have heard no such mystic sounds since the days of 

" 'High-born Hoel's harp or soft Llewellyn's lay.' 

As we passed along between Wem and Shrewsbury, 
and I eyed their blue tops seen through the wintry 
branches, or the red rustling leaves of the sturdy 
oak trees by the roadside, a sound was in my ears as 
of a Syren's song; I was stunned, startled with it, 
as from deep sleep; but I had no notion then that 
I should ever be able to express my admiration to 
others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the 
light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun's 
rays glittering in the puddles of the road." 

And then follows the account of Coleridge's ser- 
mon, next day : — 

"For myself, I could not have been more delighted 
if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and 
Philosophy had met together. Truth and Genius 
had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction 

27 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

of religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I re- 
turned home well satisfied. The sun that was still 
laboring, pale and wan, through the sky, obscured by 
thick mists, seemed an emblem of the good cause; 
and the cold dank drops of dew, that hung half 
melted on the beard of the thistle, had something 
genial and refreshing in them ; for there was a spirit 
of hope and youth in all nature, that turned every- 
thing into good." 

It is dangerous to begin quoting Hazlitt ; one never 
knows when to stop. Better even than these first 
paragraphs are the later portions of this charming 
essay, describing that visit of the following spring 
when the young Hazlitt tramped three days through 
mud and mire to see the god of his idolatry at home 
in the Nether-Stowey cottage ; was taken by Cole- 
ridge to see Wordsworth at the Alfoxden House hard 
by; discussed with Coleridge everything in heaven 
and earth, and heard Wordsworth read in solemn 
chant his yet unpublished Lyrical Ballads; lived for 
three exalted weeks in such companionship, returning 
often on evenings from Alfoxden to Stowey by the 
lovely wooded walk, when the nightingale sang in 
the leafage, the stream that slipped through the 
green glimmered in the moonlight, and Coleridge's 
voice sounded on 

"Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, 
Fix'd fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute." 
28 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

The whole picture still glows in Hazlitt's pages 
with the color of his early hope and dream. Noth- 
ing that the poets themselves wrote in that annus 
mirabilis, 1 798-1 799, not even the diary of Dorothy 
Wordsworth for those months, can bring the local 
habitation, the homely life and high thinking of 
Coleridge and Wordsworth, so vividly to the imagina- 
tion as this paper of Hazlitt's. 

At the time of this memorable visit Hazlitt was 
just completing his twentieth year. At first thought 
it may not be quite clear why he always acknowl- 
edged such great obligation to Coleridge; for his 
own mind had by this time already taken its bent, 
and he had a full set of radical opinions, if not yet 
quite made, at least in the making. 

His radicalism he came honestly by. Dissent and 
revolt, both political and religious, ran in the blood 
of his family. An elder brother of his father had 
early migrated to America, heartily espoused the 
cause of the American rebels, and served with dis- 
tinction through the Revolutionary War. Hazlitt's 
father had been educated in Glasgow University 
for a Presbyterian minister; but he soon devel- 
oped a more pronounced liberalism, and before he 
began preaching he had become a Unitarian. A 
radical in politics also, he formed the acquaintance 
of Benjamin Franklin, and during all the period of 
the American difficulties found himself in hearty 

29 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

sympathy with the cause his brother had espoused. 
After the conclusion of peace he came over to Amer- 
ica himself with his family, minded to pass his life 
in the new republic where liberty had taken up her 
seat. He did reside for more than a year in Phila- 
delphia, and gave a course of lectures in the Uni- 
versity of Pennsylvania; thence he removed to the 
vicinity of Boston, in which city he is said to have 
organized the first Unitarian society in America. 
But Unitarianism could not yet make much headway 
against Puritan orthodoxy; and no congregation 
would quite venture to give the young English 
preacher a settlement. We may surmise, too, that 
his studious and retiring temper found the atmos- 
phere of our New England society rather raw. At 
all events he returned to England in the summer of 
1787, and shortly after settled in the little parish of 
Wem, in Shropshire. Here he lived all the rest of 
his days, "repining but resigned," says his son, "far 
from the only two things he loved — talk about dis- 
puted texts of Scripture, and the cause of civil and 
religious liberty." A fine type of the learned, ra- 
tional dissenter, this elder Hazlitt, in the tiny study 
at Wem, surrounded by his tall folios, or in the garden 
gathering "broccoli plants and kidney beans of his 
own rearing," his imagination far away in dreams of 
patriarchal eld, yet now and then waking to some 
stout utterance in behalf of tolerance and liberty to- 

30 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

day. He survived to the venerable age of eighty-four ; 
and when the end came, says his daughter, "he made 
no complaint, nor did he give one groan, but went on 
talking of glory, honor, and immortality to the end." 
From him his son inherited, along with his specula- 
tive, introspective habit, a certain largeness of imagi- 
nation and a sense of the high solemnities of life. 
When Hazlitt's writing is at its very best, we may feel 
in its stately rhythm and its sublime imagery the 
moving of his father's spirit. 

It was, however, the father's love of civil and 
religious liberty that showed earliest in the young 
Hazlitt. His first printed article, a letter to a Shrews- 
bury newspaper in 1791, was an indignant rebuke of 
the intolerant churchmen who sympathized with the 
Birmingham mob that had just burned down the 
house of Dr. Priestley. The breadth of view and force 
of statement in this paper, by a boy of thirteen, was 
very remarkable. The years from fourteen to 
twenty-one are probably the determining period of 
every man's life. For Hazlitt they certainly were. 
Like so many men of generous temper, he had fallen 
under the spell of the French Revolution, which was 
unrolling its stupendous drama during just those 
years from 1792 to 1799, when his opinions were 
a-forming. Before he was seventeen he had drawn 
out a scheme of civil and criminal legislation based 
on the most doctrinaire notions of individual rights. 

3 1 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

For three or four years, thereafter, he was striving 
in vain to put into satisfactory literary shape a treatise 
on the Principles of Human Action which should 
prove " the natural disinterestedness of human 
nature." The central thesis of this speculation he 
conceived to be an important discovery of his own — 
certainly it would be important, if true. But the 
course of history in those years, one thinks, must 
have strained his theory rather severely sometimes. 
The early excesses and atrocities of the Revolution, 
the worst of which occurred while he was in his early 
teens, could not change his convictions, but (though 
there is no record of his experience in those years) 
I suspect they did sometimes becloud his enthusiasm. 
Indeed, Hazlitt was always distrustful of enthusiasm. 
He had no liking for the raw multitude, and all his 
days had some trouble to keep his sympathies on 
good terms with his principles. He confessed, later 
in life, that he had been staggered in his devotion to 
republicanism and puritanism, when he reflected that, 
though there was plenty of both in America, it was 
yet doubtful whether in all the United States, from 
Boston to Baltimore, — his geography wouldn't let 
him go farther south, — we could produce a single 
head like one of Titian's noblemen, nurtured in 
all the pride of aristocracy and all the blindness of 
popery. He never shared Wordsworth's interest in 
humble folk, and declared that those Cumberland 

32 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

ploughmen and peddlers were low company that, 
for himself, he did not care to meet. Ignorance is 
always bad enough, he said, but rustic ignorance is 
intolerable. Nor did the fact that common folk were 
hardly treated suffice to make them interesting. 
" Never pity people," he says, "because they are ill- 
used; they only wait the opportunity to use others 
just as ill." Hate the oppressor and prevent the 
evil if you can, but do not fancy there is any virtue 
in being oppressed. The unfortunate are not a jot 
more amiable than their neighbors. Such cynical 
sentiments, to be sure, come from the later years of 
disillusion; but Hazlitt was never really a democrat. 
He always hated the kings more than he loved the 
peoples. 

With this temper it is not difficult to understand 
how, by 1798, his political devotion had already 
begun to fix itself upon Napoleon Bonaparte. By the 
beginning of the nineteenth century Napoleon had 
crushed the sanguinary factions of the Revolution 
into order ; he had raised the young French republic 
out of chaos to a pitch of eminence above the highest 
dream of Richelieu; he had liberated Italy — or 
said he had ; he had shaken every throne on the con- 
tinent, and stood for the moment before all the world, 
the foe of all the elder tyranny, the champion of an 
ordered, victorious liberty. Here was a noble figure, 
u who nothing common did nor mean"; worthy 
D 33 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

to march at the front of the new age. For William 
Hazlitt, he was ever thereafter the hero who had 
broken up the old order, the protagonist in the cause 
of the Peoples against the Divine Right of Kings. 

And it was for somewhat analogous reasons that 
the young Hazlitt welcomed Coleridge so gladly. 
In those years he was an eager student of the best 
things in letters; but here again he found a clash 
between his tastes and his principles. The ablest 
contemporary literature, the eloquence, the imagina- 
tion, he had to own, were on the wrong side. He 
was quick enough to see that incomparably the best 
prose written in his time was in Burke's great pam- 
phlet against the French Revolution. "From the 
first time I ever cast my eye on anything of Burke's," 
he writes, "I said to myself, this is true eloquence. 
All other styles seemed to me pedantic or infinitesi- 
mal; Burke's was forked and playful as the light- 
ning." The doctrine was all wrong, but how im- 
mensely superior as literature was this heresy to the 
frigid sermons, the meagre and acrid pamphlets of 
the other party. It was then that he met Coleridge. 
Here, at last, was the orator, the philosopher, the 
poet — and on the side of the angels ! For those 
were the days of Coleridge young, full of all glad 
enthusiasm, and with a gift of speech to make the 
most abstruse philosophy sound musical as Apollo's 
lute. It is easy to understand what strengthening 

34 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

of resolve, what stimulus to independent thinking, 
what large though vague ideals, this man Coleridge 
would give to the lonely and isolated young thinker. 
Not, however, that there were any immediate re- 
sults to show for it. The results were to come some 
twenty years later. Throughout the period of his 
early manhood Hazlitt was, indeed, trying hard to put 
his notions on paper; but without success. He 
averred that he had thought for eight years without 
being able to write a single page. This sterility was 
due, in part, doubtless, to his own exacting literary 
judgment, in part to his inexperience and the im- 
maturity of the conceptions he was trying to express ; 
but it was due, most of all, to the fact that he was 
wrestling with subjects that, however interesting to 
him at the time, were not really congenial. Hazlitt 
was an acute and subtle thinker, but he was never a 
systematic thinker. I should say that with all his 
fondness for speculation he never had the gift of 
philosophic exposition. He is delightful whenever, 
as in his later essays, he lets himself go; and many 
really profound truths of human nature slip into the 
stream of fancy, and sentiment, and half-cynical 
observation that he pours out with no care for method. 
In fact, he never writes well save when he is writing 
of himself. But in those early efforts he was trying 
to be impersonal and philosophic. The Argument 
in Favor of the Natural Disinterestedness of the 

35 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Human Mind, — which did not get published 
until 1805, — unlike his later work, is dry as a re- 
mainder biscuit. If Hazlitt found it difficult to write, 
we find it quite as difficult to read. Nor do the 
philosophers have much to say for it. The central 
theme of the treatise Hazlitt thought to be an impor- 
tant discovery of his own; namely, that there is no 
such thing "as an innate and necessary selfishness." 
Which may or may not be true, Hazlitt' s argument 
thereupon not being lucid to the non-metaphysical 
mind; but as he admits "a practical self-interest 
arising out of habit and circumstances" which may 
serve as well as the innate article, the "discovery" 
would not seem very startling. Hazlitt himself al- 
ways had a fondness for the book, — I suppose because 
it had cost him so much labor, — and he reworked 
the substance of it in two of his later essays. 

Hopeless of success in literature, Hazlitt tried 
art. His elder brother was a portrait painter of 
some promise, and he resolved to adopt the same 
profession. In 1802, after the peace of Amiens, 
he went over to Paris to study in the Louvre, just 
then enriched by Napoleon's plunder from all the 
galleries of Europe. But in this art, too, he felt his 
powers fell far short of his ideals, and about 1806, 
after years of patient effort, he laid down his brush. 
Yet those years were, perhaps, among the most 
profitable of his life. He was not only preparing 

36 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

himself to be as good a critic of art as of literature, 
but he was gaining a delicacy of perception and a 
keenness of appreciation for all the outward charm 
of the world that was to make him one of the most 
picturesque of writers. And it is perhaps not fanci- 
ful to say that his constant endeavor as a portrait 
painter to read the meaning of faces had something 
to do with his remarkable power in the analysis and 
interpretation of character, shown in his later writ- 
ings. 

But whatever the profit of those years of appren- 
ticeship to art, they certainly were the happiest 
years of Hazlitt's life. No one can read his delight- 
ful essay On the Pleasures of Painting without 
feeling that he was doing what he loved to do. For 
he loved to live by himself, with the companionship 
of those forms of nature and those works of art that 
will not quarrel nor betray. His work as a painter 
called him out of the temper of irritation to which 
he was naturally inclined, out of the meaner accom- 
paniments of controversy, and gave him for a time 
a certain poise and quiet. For beauty always has 
one advantage over truth as an object of contempla- 
tion — you know it when you see it ; you cannot 
doubt or dispute over it. 

Hazlitt's mind was ripening in all ways during the 
years from 1798 to 1808; by the end of that decade 
it had got its growth. The thirty or forty books 

37 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

that were to be his life-long companions — Shake- 
speare, Milton, Rousseau, the eighteenth-century 
English essayists and writers, to name only those 
he liked most — he had got by heart; for the rest 
of his life he kept on reading them over and over. 
He used to say in later life that he had not read a 
new book since he was thirty. His political notions, 
too, had taken their final shape, and had subtly 
linked themselves with the brightest memories of 
that golden time. In the essay On the Pleasures 
of Painting he tells us with a thrill of longing and 
recollection how he finished one of his first portraits 
on the day which brought news of the battle of 
Austerlitz. 

" I walked out in the afternoon, and as I returned, 
saw the evening star set over a poor man's cottage, 
with other thoughts and feelings than I shall ever 
have again. Oh, for the revolution of the great 
Platonic year, that those days might come over again ! 
I could gladly sleep out the intervening 365,000 
years!" 

One thinks, by contrast, of the great Pitt, on hear- 
ing the same news, saying in despair, "Fold up the 
map of Europe," and sinking back to die. To the 
statesman it was the dark close of a great chapter 
of history; to the young painter the triumphal 
opening of a new one. In fact, I think one reason 
why Hazlitt held so obstinately to his opinions was 

38 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

that they had been identified with his purest senti- 
ments, hallowed by a thousand of the dearest asso- 
ciations of his youth. To deny or change them 
seemed treachery to the best impulses of his best 
years. 

Just what Hazlitt was doing for several years after 
he gave up painting, is not very clear. His home, 
up to about 1808, seems to have been with his 
father at Wem ; but he was much in London, and in 
1805 he had formed the acquaintance of his best 
friend, Charles Lamb. For the next twenty years 
it was at this quiet bachelor fireside of Charles and 
Mary Lamb that he found his tongue loosened to 
say his best and brightest things. He soon met all 
of Lamb's set, — Godwin, Burney, Manning, Rick- 
man, Dyer, and the rest, — and though he was too 
shy and moody to be a "clubable man," his face 
came to be familiar at Lamb's Wednesday nights, 
and in some fortunate hours he could be the most 
brilliant of the company. Mary said he was orna- 
mental as a Wednesday man, but he was more useful 
on common days, when he dropped in after a quarrel 
or a fit of the glooms. He had no desire to extend 
the circle of his acquaintance, especially in that half 
of society a young man of twenty-seven might have 
been thought most willing to know. Lamb writes 
to Wordsworth in 1806: "W. Hazlitt is in town. 
I took him to see a very pretty girl professedly, 

39 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

where there were two young girls — the very head 
and sum of the Girlery was two young girls — they 
neither laughed, nor sneered, nor giggled, nor whis- 
pered — but they were young girls — and he sat 
and frowned blacker and blacker, indignant that 
there should be such a thing as Youth and Beauty, 
till he tore me away before supper in perfect misery, 
and owned that he could not bear young girls. They 
drove him mad. So I took him home to my old nurse, 
where he recovered perfect tranquillity. Indepen- 
dent of this, and as I am not a young girl myself, 
he is a great acquisition to us." ! 

In 1808, however, the misogynist, having no 
visible means of support, married — having first 
written a refutation of the doctrines of Malthus. 
The lady was Miss Sarah Stoddard, a friend of the 
Lambs, who apparently had not enough of either 
youth or beauty to frighten Hazlitt's shyness. Miss 
Stoddard was the kind of a woman spoken of with 
awe as "of superior ability"; well emancipated, 
strong of mind and body. She had, moreover, 
some eighty pounds a year, while Hazlitt, as Lamb 
said, had only what he could claim from the parish. 
In addition to her income she had a Lilliputian 
estate at Winterslow, near Salisbury, and there the 
newly married couple took up their residence. Four 
years later, however, in 181 2, finding it necessary to 

1 June 26, 1806. 
40 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

do something for the support of his family, Hazlitt 
came up to London, and spent most of his after 
life there. Yet he always had a fondness for Winter- 
slow. A lonely wayside inn on the edge of the heath, 
a mile from the village, was the refuge to which, in 
all his later years, he would flee when vexed by 
society or craving solitude for work. His very best 
writing was done there. 

On coming up to London, Hazlitt obtained a posi- 
tion on the Chronicle newspaper, first as reporter 
and then as theatrical critic. But it was Leigh 
Hunt's Examiner that enabled him to find his genius. 
In 1814 Hunt projected a series of essays in the 
easy manner of Addison which should deal with the 
humors, the foibles, the philosophy of daily life. 
In these papers, afterward collected under the title 
The Round Table, Hazlitt first opened that delight- 
ful personal vein in which all his best work is done. 
His drudgery on the Chronicle had shown him that 
he could write when he must ; now for the first time 
he found it easy to write. He was morbidly shy and 
reserved in company, but for that very reason the 
most unreserved of authors with the pen. The 
man who doesn't dare to take himself for granted in 
society is just the most communicative in his study. 
He isn't talking to you, he is talking to himself — 
and talking about himself. There is criticism, and 
satire, and fancy, and philosophy in what Hazlitt 

41 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

writes; but it is all in the first person, all passed 
through the medium of his own feeling. It is William 
Hazlitt pouring himself out on paper. 

After the appearance of the Table Talk Hazlitt 
was sure of an audience and a publisher, and might 
have been secure from pecuniary embarrassment, 
had he not always obeyed somewhat too literally the 
Scripture injunction to take no thought for the 
morrow. In the fifteen years that remained to him 
he produced a very considerable body of literature. 
The best of it is in the volumes entitled Table Talk 
and The Plain Speaker, and in similar papers con- 
tributed to various periodicals, and collected by his 
son under the title Sketches and Essays. In 1818 
he gave two courses of literary lectures on the 
English Comic Writers and on the English Poets; 
and in the following year a third course on the 
Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. These 
essays and lectures, with some other critical and 
miscellaneous writing, fill twelve rather stodgy vol- 
umes in the latest edition of his works. To these 
we must add what he himself deemed his magnum 
opus, the Life of Napoleon, upon which he lavished 
the toil of his last years. 

The life of Hazlitt, after he had once found his pen 
and his place, is without noteworthy external inci- 
dent, if we except those growing out of his domestic 
infelicity. That is not a pretty, nor — for us — a 

42 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

very important story. What perverse fate induced 
William Hazlitt and Sarah Stoddard to marry, no 
man can tell; though doubtless Miss Stoddard 
could have given a syllogism for it — she was of that 
sort. But Hazlitt said in a charming essay, "I 
love myself without a reason; I would have my 
wife do so, too." Lamb thought there was some 
love on both sides at first, but apparently not 
enough to last long. There was never any violent 
rupture, still less any jealousy on either side or any 
cause for it; but the very unconventional ways of 
Mrs. Hazlitt evidently got on her husband's nerves 
a good deal, while to a woman of her large, red 
health such a man as Hazlitt doubtless seemed a 
poor creature. After 1819 they lived mostly apart, 
and in 1822, by mutual consent, went up to Edin- 
burgh to make the forty days' residence there neces- 
sary for a divorce under the Scottish law. Mrs. 
Hazlitt's journal during this time shows a remarkable 
superiority to considerations of sentiment. Hazlitt 
himself, meantime, during one of his periods of 
bachelor residence in London, had fallen very pre- 
cipitously in love with a certain Sarah Walker, the 
daughter of a tailor in whose house he was lodging. 
Probably a little flattered and a little bewildered by 
the attentions of so singular a character, the girl did 
not at once refuse them, and Hazlitt's regard passed 
at once into something like insanity. Miss Walker, 

43 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

however, had sense enough to see that marriage with 
him would be folly; while he was in Edinburgh she 
refused to correspond with him, and when he re- 
turned to London, a separated man, he found that 
she had wisely transferred her regard to an earlier 
and younger suitor. Hazlitt thereupon sat down 
and put the whole story of his passion into a book, 
which in its astonishing frankness quite out-Rous- 
seaus Rousseau. The Liber Amoris (which Mr. 
Le Gallienne took needless trouble to rescue from 
oblivion in a reprint some years ago) is not exactly 
a bad book — there was nothing base in Hazlitt's 
infatuation; but in its vulgar lack of all reserve it 
is nearly as unpleasant reading as some of our 
modern decadent novels. To say the truth, there 
is, not only here but occasionally elsewhere in Haz- 
litt's explosions of petulance or of sentiment, some- 
thing a little under-bred. He hadn't quite the 
dignified reticence of a gentleman. Sarah Walker 

— having once " cleansed his stuffed bosom of that 
perilous stuff" by publishing the Liber Amoris 

— he speedily forgot. Next year, 1824, he married 
a certain Mrs. Bridgewater, of whom nothing 
particular is known save she had three hundred 
pounds a year. On this Hazlitt took the conti- 
nental journey he had long coveted, to Paris (where 
he met the first Mrs. Hazlitt and gave her some of 
the second Mrs. Hazlitt's money), to Genoa, Florence, 

44 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

and Rome. The last part of his wedding journey, 
however, he seems to have taken alone; and when, 
on his return to England next year, he wrote to his 
wife asking her to join him, she replied that they 
were now separated forever. From that time Hazlitt 
led a rather hermit-like life in London and in the 
Hut at Winterslow, writing occasionally for the 
magazines and for the Edinburgh, and toiling hard 
at his Life of Napoleon. His health, injured per- 
haps by his habit of drinking enormous quan- 
tities of strong tea, began to break, and he died 
in 1830, at the age of fifty-two. 

II 

Hazlitt's last words were, "Well, I have had a 
happy life." This certainly seems at first blush 
a strange verdict upon a life full of disappointment 
and complaint. For Hazlitt had never mastered 
the art of living with men, still less the art of living 
with woman. His best friends found him sometimes 
very difficult. He was morbidly timid and sus- 
picious by nature. De Quincey says that if Hazlitt 
left some friend in a room for a few minutes, on his 
return he would look about him with a mixed air of 
suspicion and defiance as if challenging something 
that had been said against him in his absence. 
Leigh Hunt used to describe a shake of his hand as 

45 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

something like a fish tendering you his fin. His 
face wore habitually a half-sad, half-angry look, over 
which some high thought or noble feeling would 
throw a sudden flash as of a lightning gleam, then 
fading out again in sullen night. He knew him- 
self the most awkward of mortals, and in one of his 
essays confesses that he had never been able to 
come through a door gracefully. In an admirable 
letter to his son just going away to school, he says 
with an evident ^twinge of memory: "I wish you 
to learn Latin, French, and dancing. I would 
insist upon the last more particularly, because it is 
of the greatest consequence to your success in life." 
And this moody sensitiveness was, of course, 
increased by the publicity that his writings brought 
him. His political opinions drew down upon his 
head the most virulent criticism from the Tory 
Quarterly and the Blackwood. The whiskey-drinking, 
swash-buckler reviewers of the Blackwood, especially, 
assailed him, after their wont, with such personal 
abuse that Mr. Blackwood was forced to some sort 
of apology, under threat of a suit for libel. Such 
attacks put Hazlitt into a kind of trembling, angry 
terror, and actually drove him for days into seclu- 
sion. Nor could he expect active sympathy from 
any quarter. His old friends, he felt, had been 
alienated by his own political consistency. The 
cause to which Coleridge and Wordsworth and 

46 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

Southey, as well as himself, had given their alle- 
giance a score of years before, they had now basely 
deserted. He hated Southey almost as heartily as 
he hated Wellington; and he is always lamenting 
over Coleridge, as over an archangel fallen. On 
the other hand, he distrusted all mere doctrinaire 
radicals and fanatics, all loud declaimers like Byron, 
and for such rhapsodical enthusiasts as Shelley, he 
had a dislike amounting to a positive contempt. 
Such men, he thought, had wrecked the Revolu- 
tion at its beginning. As it was, he felt himself 
on most matters of importance in a minority of one, 
an Ishmaelite with every man's hand against him. 
The one man whom he did admire to idolatry was 
the one man whom all parties united to fear and 
to detest — Napoleon Bonaparte. Waterloo closed 
the chapter of his hopes. When the Congress of 
Vienna set up the Bourbon monarchy in France — 
an abomination in a desolation — and forced upon 
prostrate Europe the old odious doctrine of the 
Divine Right of Kings, Hazlitt refused any longer 
to look to the future. Thereafter he solaced himself 
with memories and with the proud consciousness 
of his own loyalty to a fallen cause. 

"For my part, I started in life with the French 
Revolution, and I have lived, alas ! to see the end 
of it. But I did not foresee this result. My sun 
arose with the first dawn of liberty, and I did not 

47 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

think how soon both must set. The new impulse to 
ardor given to men's minds imparted a congenial 
warmth and glow to mine ; we were strong to run a 
race together, and I little dreamed that long before 
mine was set, the sun of liberty would turn to blood, 
or set once more in the night of despotism. Since 
then, I confess, I have no longer felt myself young, 
for with that my hopes fell." 

This disappointment came, we shall remember, 
just as his own literary career was opening, and gave 
a bitter taste to all his success. Indeed he never 
cared much for merely literary success. The higher 
forms of creative literature he knew himself unequal 
to ; the reviews and essays for the magazines he con- 
sidered of little permanent value. He would have 
been pleased to render some signal literary service 
to a cause of which he felt himself a champion 
or a martyr ; but the only two of his books that he 
prized few people would read then and nobody reads 
now, — the essay on the Disinterestedness of the 
Human Mind and the Life of Napoleon. Thus dis- 
appointed and embittered, he identified his disap- 
pointments with his principles, and persuaded him- 
self that he did well to be angry. And he could be 
very angry. Burke's apostasy drove him into a kind 
of a frenzy: "That man . . . who has done more 
mischief than perhaps any other man in the world 

48 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

. . . who would have blotted out the broad, pure 
light of heaven because it did not first shine in at 
the little Gothic windows of St. Stephen's Chapel ! 
. . . " and he goes on until his indignation fairly chokes 
him. Wellington had won Waterloo because he was 
just stupid enough to sit still and let his army do what 
it chose; Walter Scott, like Bacon, was the "greatest, 
wisest, meanest of mankind"; Gifford was a "low- 
bred, self-taught, servile pedant, a doorkeeper and a 
lacquey to learning," admirably qualified by a com- 
bination of defects to be the editor of the Quarterly 
Review. In some of his angry and querulous moods 
he manages to score about all his contemporaries. 
Even Lamb fell under his displeasure for a time, 
and Mary wished Hazlitt would not hate mankind 
quite so universally. 

Yet, after all, I think Hazlitt's last words were not 
untrue. For the final impression one gets from 
reading him is that his life was by no means all un- 
happy. For one thing he must have got a good deal 
of pleasure out of his antipathies. Nobody liked 
a fight better. " Good nature," he says somewhere, 
"is only another name for stupidity," in nine cases 
out of ten mere indolence of disposition. Your 
really amiable people are those the world calls 
disagreeable — like himself. They will not weakly 
consent with you. They have opinions of their 
own, and the spirit to defend them, and are willing 
e 49 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

to sacrifice even the failings of their friends at the 
shrine of truth. For himself, he took care that his 
best friendships should not grow stagnant by long 
standing. He owned that he had quarrelled with 
all his acquaintances at one time or another, and 
shouldn't have liked them much unless he had. 
He cared little for the people who had no faults to 
talk about. But he enjoyed most a settled, hearty 
antipathy, one that would keep for a lifetime, and 
enlist his principles in its behalf. One of his most 
characteristic essays is entitled On the Pleasures 
of Hating; and it is written with gusto. Happiness, 
as well as virtue, he held, consists not merely in 
loving the good, but in hating the evil; and he 
could always identify the evil he hated with some 
pet adversary of his own. His pleasure was all the 
keener that he knew himself always on the unpopu- 
lar side, and could taste the sweet sense of being 
wronged. And as there was no one his match in 
venomed satire, he had the peculiarly happy fortune 
of vanquishing his antagonist and losing his cause; 
and thus enjoyed at once the pride of victory and the 
pride of martyrdom. 

In truth, no small share of the satisfaction of Haz- 
litt's maturer life came from a certain high, self-ap- 
proving melancholy. He felt himself one of the faith- 
ful few who championed a lost cause, who despair but 
never surrender. He would fain withdraw from a 

5° 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

world that misunderstood and slandered him, and 
cloister himself with his books and his memories 
to chew the cud of bitter-sweet fancy. II Penseroso 
is far from being an unhappy man; and almost all 
his delights were well known to William Hazlitt. 
Such essays as Reading Old Books, On Living to 
One's Self , On the Past and Future, Why Distant 
Objects Please, A Farewell to Essay Writing, are 
the most perfect expression in modern prose writing 
of Milton's ideal, worthy companions of his immor- 
tally familiar verse. The charms of art and letters 
and music, the graver and more pensive beauties of 
the world about us, softened in the mellow light of 
memory — one sees them all in such essays, and 
knows that the writer could not have been altogether 
unhappy. 

And in such essays it is easy to discover the charm 
of the man's personality. For Hazlitt was not a 
cynic, rather a sentimentalist. His sensibilities were 
overstrung. His shyness and suspicion, his irritabil- 
ity of temper, really came of an eager, timorous 
craving for sympathy that he never expected to 
find. Underneath his moods there was a hunger 
for affection. The few friends who really under- 
stood him, while they enjoyed his stinging satire, 
his subtle paradox, knew that behind the mask of 
this shy and moody temper the man cherished an 
admiration for all noble things, a love for all beauti- 

5 1 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

ful things; they knew that the enmity and irritation 
that made him difficult were often half affected, to 
give pungency to his criticism, while his friendships 
were real and abiding. The tribute of his best and 
most discriminating friend, Lamb, in an oft-quoted 
letter to Southey, is proof enough of the essential 
manhood of Hazlitt: "I think W. H. to be, in his 
natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and 
finest spirits breathing; so far from being ashamed 
of that intimacy which was between us, it is my 
boast that I was able for so many years to have 
possessed it entire ; and I think I shall go to my grave 
without finding or expecting to find such a compan- 
ion." 

Ill 

But whatever Hazlitt was as a man, he was cer- 
tainly one of the most delightful of writers. Let me 
first except Sir Walter's novels and everything of 
Lamb's, and then I insist that the very best prose 
written in England between 1800 and 1830 is to be 
found in the pages of William Hazlitt. Nobody is 
obliged to read anybody's Complete Works. Drop 
out the Liber Amoris and most of the attempts 
at formal philosophical and political discussion, 
and there will still remain a body of Hazlitt's writ- 
ing which by comparison makes De Quincey seem 
tumid, Wilson turgid, and Hunt vapid. Indeed I 

52 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

can understand, though I cannot quite share, the 
preference Walter Bagehot is said to have expressed 
for Hazlitt over Lamb. As far as mere style goes, 
I should hold that Hazlitt had no equal in his day. 
"He says things of his own in a way of his own," 
declared Coleridge ; which is not a very inadequate 
description of good prose. Perhaps he had not the 
constructive ability for a great work, — though the 
Napoleon is very well composed, — but we have 
no better master of the short familiar essay. De 
Quincey, always unfair to Hazlitt, complained that 
he was never eloquent because his thoughts were 
"abrupt, discontinuous, non-sequacious." Perhaps 
he was not eloquent; eloquence is usually out of 
place in such writings as his, though there are many 
passages in these essays that, if not eloquent, are 
something better. But Hazlitt's writing, whether 
"sequacious" or not, is never without both order 
and movement. De Quincey had taken as his 
model the long-breathed, pompous English of the 
early seventeenth century, and refused to admire 
any writing that did not echo that prolonged sonorous 
note. Hazlitt's models — so far as he had any — 
were rather the essayists of the next century, Addison, 
Steele, Swift; and no more serviceable, idiomatic 
English than theirs was ever written. He has their 
ease and urbanity, their love of the first person 
singular, their gift to put themselves en rapport with 

53 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

the reader. But he has, also, what they never had, 
a vivid imagination and a quick sense of the ro- 
mantic. He cannot announce any proposition but 
instantly there comes trooping about it a throng of 
images and examples. His style is, therefore, of 
necessity profuse, but it is neither diffuse nor 
labored. When he gets into a glow of passion or 
imagination, he may go on piling clause upon clause, 
and sometimes makes a sentence of portentous 
length, but his structure is simple; he has no tricks 
of style, and his very mannerisms are unconscious. 
His language is choice, but it is the speech of daily 
life, without a trace of preciosity. He is always 
spontaneous and sincere. He is certainly very 
extravagant now and then, especially in his abuse, 
and pours upon his enemy "a nice derangement of 
epitaphs"; but he is genuinely angry. For the 
moment he means all he says; though very likely 
on the next page he may relent and salve the wound 
he has made by some regretful memory or confes- 
sion. No writing was ever less bookish; it is 
the voice of William Hazlitt speaking right on. 
Mr. Henley is so impressed with this colloquial 
charm as to believe that, excellent as is Hazlitt's 
writing, he must have talked even better than he 
wrote. But I doubt that. It is not of record that 
he talked brilliantly, save now and then when alone 
with Lamb or one or two other intimates. Listen- 

54 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

ers put him out. I suspect he always talked best 
with himself, alone with his books and his memories, 
in the Hut at Winterslow. 

He has been criticised for his habit of profuse 
quotation. It would be a juster criticism that he 
quotes very carelessly. In a lecture on Shakespeare 
he remarks that "in trying to recollect any other 
author we sometimes stumble, in case of failure, on a 
word as good ; in Shakespeare any other word but 
the true one is sure to be wrong." And then, within 
three pages, he quotes from Hamlet after this fashion : 

"There is a willow hanging o'er a brook 
That shows its hoary leaves in the glassy stream," 

which is what FalstafT might term "damnable 
iteration." But the very freedom of his quotations, 
at all events, proves them unstudied. They slip 
unconsciously into his lines from the stores of his 
memory ; and the stuff of his own writing is so good 
as not to suffer by contrast with his frequent borrow- 
ings. 

But though Hazlitt's style is so spontaneous, it 
is never really careless or slovenly. His best work 
was done rapidly, illumined by the momentary 
play of allusion and the gleam of fancy best struck 
out when the mind is heated and eager. Yet it 
always shows that instinctive sense of phrase which 
is the hall-mark of good style; and it always has 

55 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

that crowning grace of prose, a good rhythm. All 
good writing, he says somewhere, sounds well when 
read aloud; his own bears that test. His manner, 
while familiar, has not only ease, but distinction. 
He said, with pardonable pride, in his last years, 
"I have written no common-place, nor a line that 
licks the dust." And frequently in some mood of 
lofty thought or mournful memory his effects of tone 
and rhythm are far more subtle and moving than any 
of De Quincey's bravura. There are such passages in 
the essay On Antiquity, — an essay that Sir Thomas 
Browne would have loved — in that On the Feeling of 
Immortality in Youth, On Novelty and Familiarity, 
and in half a score of others. Read a dozen of his 
essays, with their constant play of allusion, their apt — 
if over-abundant — quotation ; their fleeting glimpses 
of imagination, now august, now beautiful, now 
pathetic, but always vivid; their brilliant, half- 
earnest paradox; their mild tone of melancholy 
reflection ; their flashes of cynical satire ; all flowing 
in a rhythm, unstudied yet varied and musical — 
and then you understand why many of the best 
masters of modern prose — Macaulay, Walter 
Bagehot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Augustine 
Birrell — have given to the style of Hazlitt their 
praise and the better tribute of imitation. "We are 
fine fellows," said Stevenson once, in despairing ad- 
miration, "but we can't write like William Hazlitt." 

56 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

If we turn to the matter of his writing, it may be 
perhaps admitted that, outside of his literary criti- 
cism, he had not much to teach us. If a man has 
resolved never to change his mind, it doesn't much 
matter what he thinks. Hazlitt had practically 
left off thinking at thirty, and his opinions, there- 
fore, had mostly stiffened into prejudices before he 
was fifty. His political principles had all resolved 
themselves into hatred of the authority of kings. 
On that theme he has numerous variations, and 
he can be infinitely entertaining in his attacks, angry 
or mournful, upon the enemies of the truth once 
delivered to William Hazlitt and Napoleon Bona- 
parte; but it cannot be said that he is very instruc- 
tive. The final result of a quarter-century of political 
struggle, diplomatic scheming, and gigantic military 
effort, all over Europe, had been, so he thought, 
to send to St. Helena the one great foe of sanctified 
tyranny, and to force upon the world a solemn assent 
to that blasphemous doctrine, the Divine Right of 
Kings. And to this result both parties in England 
had contributed in about equal measure. The 
best statement of his attitude toward English politics 
after Waterloo is found in his preface to a volume 
of political essays collected in 1819. The Tories, 
of course, are the objects of his bitter hatred, the 
inveterate foes of popular liberty, the leaders in that 
opposition which had crushed the movements of 

57 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

revolution all over Europe, reseated a Bourbon on 
the throne of France, and arrayed a million of 
bayonets in defence of the odious doctrine of Divine 
Right. Yet, at all events, the Tories were to be 
credited with consistency. You knew what they 
were at. The Whigs, on the contrary, have not 
the courage of their convictions, or they have no con- 
victions. To be an English Whig in the glorious 
days of 1688 was to be a representative of the people, 
that People who had deposed one King to make 
another, and could do it again. But now, under 
such sophistical teaching as that of Burke, the 
Whigs were substantially at one with the Tories 
on the only questions of importance. In the great 
European case of the People vs. the Kings, they 
were on the side of the Kings. " A modern Whig," 
says Hazlitt, bitterly, "is the fag end of a Tory 
... a Trimmer, that is, a coward to both sides of a 
question, who dares not be known as an honest 
man, but is a sort of whiffling, shuffling, cunning, 
silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two." 
The two great Reviews were like opposite coaches, 
"that raise a great deal of dust and spatter one 
another with mud, but both travel on the same 
road and arrive at the same destination." As to 
the doctrinaire radicals, Godwin, Bentham, Home 
Tooke, and the rest, they were little better. They 
really represent not the people, but each man him- 

58 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

self and nobody else. They have each his own 
theory, and are bent on reforming the world by pure 
reason; overlooking the sentiments, affections, and 
prejudices of man, they cannot combine and cannot 
command. They furnish no principle of party 
cohesion, and consequently can never hope to do 
anything against the well-compacted forces of 
legitimacy and tradition. A reformer, in fact, is 
pretty sure to turn out a marplot. To the charge 
that in this condemnation he involved himself, 
Hazlitt would probably have assented readily enough. 
He knew that he had no gift for association or 
leadership. In the opening sentences of the pref- 
ace just quoted, he says, "I am no politician, and 
still less can I be said to be a party man ; but I have 
a hatred for tyranny and a contempt for its tools." 
His writing on political matters is, unfortunately, 
mostly limited to the various expressions of this 
hatred ; and he never seemed to have any just appre- 
ciation of the great force of liberal sentiment that 
was gathering head in England for the twenty years 
after Waterloo, to culminate in the reforms of 
1832. 

Mr. Saintsbury, who always likes good round 
statement, pronounces Hazlitt the greatest critic 
England has yet produced. This seems to me a 
little extravagant; but if he will change the tense of 

59 



\ 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

his verb, I agree. Hazlitt was the greatest critic 
England had seen up to that time. The truth is, 
as Hazlitt himself admirably says, "Coleridge threw 
a great stone into the standing pool of English 
criticism which spattered some people with mud, 
but which gave a motion to the surface which has not 
since subsided." Coleridge's own work, of course, 
was mostly inchoate or fragmentary; but he certainly 
did give a new character and direction to criticism; 
and Hazlitt was first of the many critics to feel his 
influence. His criticism is to be found not only in 
his lectures on English writers, but scattered through 
all his miscellaneous writing, some of the best of it 
in passing comment or illustration. It is never 
formal or systematic. He repudiates over and 
over again the academic criticism of the eighteenth 
century, which judged a work of the imagination by 
the measuring-rod of Aristotle, often without giving 
us any idea of its power and charm. Montaigne 
— of whom he gives an admirable estimate in a 
single page — he avers to be the true critic, "who 
didn't compare books with rule and system or fall 
out with a book that is good for anything because all 
the angles on the corners are not right angles," 
but rather tells us what he himself likes in it. This 
is always Hazlitt's method. He is the first of Eng- 
lish impressionist critics, and he is still one of the 
very best. Though his manner may seem sketchy or 

60 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

discursive, he succeeds in saying the few essential 
things about his author. He goes to the root of the 
matter. His brief comments, for example, on 
Addison, Steele, or Swift are better as appreciations 
than half an acre of academic platitude. There is 
a personal quality in his criticism. He writes with 
gusto. A book to him is not a mere academic 
exercise, a "piece of literature"; it is a piece of 
life, the voice of a man or a woman with whom it 
is worth while to be acquainted. Criticism thus 
becomes intimate, familiar. You may very often 
discover the essential character of a book as of a 
man, by some incidental question, some shrewd 
practical comparison of views. You want to find 
out, not how your book conforms to certain rules; 
you want to find out what it is good for. Now 
Hazlitt has in a remarkable degree the gift to enjoy 
for himself what is best in literature, and the gift to 
convey that enjoyment to his reader — which I take 
it is the chief function of criticism. 

To be sure, criticism of this sort has its limitations. 
It is likely to be confined to the range of the critic's 
favorite reading. Fortunately, however, Hazlitt's 
taste was sound, and it was catholic. He seldom 
made the mistake of liking the second best better 
than he liked the best. I do not think his reading 
was exhaustive in any period of our literature. He 
cared little for the little men. In his lectures on 

61 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

English poetry he slips hastily over the minor seven- 
teenth-century men, owning that with some of them — 
Donne, for example — he has no acquaintance. He 
sometimes took the dangerous risk of judging an 
author by a small sample. Thus all the biographies 
record that he once lectured on Beaumont and 
Fletcher and was afterwards foolish enough to let 
out that he had only read about a quarter of their 
work; but it was probably the best quarter, for the 
lecture is a very good one. But what I here insist 
on is that he had a thoroughly sympathetic appre- 
ciation of the best work of widely different periods. 
He was in hearty accord with the new romantic 
liking for Shakespeare and the Elizabethan drama; 
but at the same time he protested earnestly against 
the blindness of those critics who, like De Quincey, 
could see nothing worthy to be called poetry in Pope. 
In fact, the best criticism of Shakespeare, save only 
that of Coleridge, written in that generation, and the 
best estimate of Pope, so far as I know, in any genera- 
tion, are both to be found in the lectures of Hazlitt. 
It would be difficult to name any critic who has 
shown sufficient breadth of appreciation to estimate 
with equal justice such widely different poets as 
Shakespeare, Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, and Byron. 
It is a more serious objection to the impressionist 
critic that he has no historical perspective. Hazlitt, 
it may be admitted, seldom makes any attempt to 

62 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

set an author in his proper surroundings or to show 
how the essential qualities of the literature of a period 
are decided, or at all events largely influenced, by 
political and social conditions. He was interested 
in the absolute value of a book, not in the forces of 
circumstance and environment that may have pro- 
duced it. Nor could we expect him to be. The 
historical type of criticism is of recent growth; and 
its value is perhaps overestimated in these days when 
we tend to explain everything by the principle of 
evolution. For, after all, every great work of liter- 
ature is differentiated from every other as the expres- 
sion of a unique personality that cannot be pre- 
dicted or explained. 

But though Hazlitt's critical writing is made up for 
the most part of his personal judgments, it should 
not be thought that these judgments are purely 
empirical or unreasoned. Quite the contrary. He 
knew not only what he liked, but why he liked it. 
His mind was prone to speculation, and while he 
makes no parade of critical principles, there are 
frequent passages of reflection in all his work 
which unite philosophic acumen with literary 
sensibility. The lecture on Descriptive Poetry, 
for example, contains an acute analysis of the 
charm of nature, especially as used in literature. 
A collection of such passages and sentences, 
culled from his writing, would form a very con- 

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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

siderable body of critical dicta. His one attempt 
at more systematic examination of an abstract 
literary theme, the lecture on The Nature of Poetry, 
is, in my judgment, one of the very best contribu- 
tions to that world-old discussion. 

Perhaps the surest proof of a critic's ability is to 
be found in his verdicts upon his contemporaries. 
So long as he attempts little more than to explain 
and justify the decisions of posterity, he runs little 
risk of serious error; but it is quite another thing 
to discover genius yet unheralded, to withstand 
obstinate prejudice, or to refuse adulation to the 
reigning popular idol. Hazlitt stands this test well. 
In only one instance is there any pronounced dissent 
to-day from his judgments upon his contemporaries. 1 
The Edinburgh Review article on Shelley (July, 
1824) will always be resented by Shelleyans; we 
may all admit that it is deficient in sympathy. Yet 
something may be said for Hazlitt. Shelley, the 
man, his opinions, his philosophy of life, he esti- 
mated very justly. No one has better expressed the 
visionary quality of Shelley's thought, combined with 

1 1 assume that the review of Coleridge's Christabel in the 
Edinburgh Review, September, 1816, was not written by Hazlitt. 
I am not unaware that the authorship of the paper is still in dis- 
pute ; but for myself I can find in it no trace of Hazlitt's manner. 
He could be caustic enough on the character and opinions of 
Coleridge ; but such stupid comment as this on Coleridge's poetry he 
never wrote. The article in my opinion is aut Jeffrey aut diabolus. 

64 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

high sincerity of purpose and a certain lonely obsti- 
nacy of will. But the poetry of such a nature Hazlitt 
could not highly prize. It seemed to him deficient in 
genuine human interest. Hazlitt always liked to keep 
his feet on the ground ; and this verse was pure vision, 
a beautiful mist arising from social and political doc- 
trines essentially untrue. We shall remember that 
Mr. Matthew Arnold held a not dissimilar opinion. 
It is certainly to be said in praise of Hazlitt's 
contemporary criticism that it was proof against 
his party spleen. He kept his prejudices out of his 
verdicts most remarkably. In those days, when to be 
a Liberal was to be damned without mercy by the 
Quarterly and by Blackwood, he was always ready 
to own that good might come even out of a quar- 
terly reviewer. We have seen how he united the most 
inflammatory hatred of Burke with enthusiastic 
admiration for Burke's writing. Sir Walter Scott, 
the hide-bound Tory aristocrat, the servile wor- 
shipper of kings, he abuses through a portentous 
sentence two pages long into which he has gathered 
pretty nearly all the vocabulary of opprobrium; 
and in the same essay he fairly goes into rapture over 
the Waverley Novels — the worst of them, he says, is 
better than any other person's best, and all together 
they are a new edition of human nature. Words- 
worth, the solid, conservative stamp-distributor, who 
sat in the Lake District solemnly admiring his own 
f 65 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

moral being, was the butt of some of his keenest 
satire; but the very best and most discriminating 
criticism of Wordsworth's poetry between 1815 and 
1825 was written by Hazlitt; indeed, I hardly know 
of any better since. Even Southey, the renegade 
laureate of George the Fourth, with his absurd 
Kehamas and Visions of Judgment, Hazlitt praises 
generously — though perhaps always with a tinge 
of irony — as one of the best of prose-writers and 
admirable of men, as virtuous as though there were 
no cakes and ale. It was Lamb who said (and all 
critics after him) that Hazlitt was more just in his 
praise than in his blame ; the truth seems to be that 
he was just to literary excellence wherever he found 
it. It was only the dull pretenders like Gifford, 
whose politics and literature were alike intolerable, 
that provoked his unmixed hatred. 

But the most interesting, and I think the most 
valuable, part of Hazlitt's work is to be found, not in 
his criticism, but in the miscellaneous essays in 
the Table Talk, the Winterslow Essays, the Round 
Table, the Plain Speaker. These essays are so 
varied in subject that it is not easy to describe them, 
but they all have this in common: they are sub- 
jective and autobiographical. Hazlitt is drawing 
directly upon his own experience. In this, by the 
way, he is doing just what his contemporaries were 

66 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

doing. That was the period of egotism in English 
literature. Not only the prose men, — Hazlitt, 
De Quincey, Lamb, — but even more noticeably the 
great poets, — Wordsworth, reverently detailing 
through eight thousand lines the growth of his mind ; 
Byron, bearing over Europe the pageant of his bleed- 
ing heart ; Shelley, panting with alternate aspiration 
and despair, — every one of them "looked in his heart 
and wrote." Scott alone had some dramatic gift 
and could find his themes outside himself. The 
value of such self-revelation depended, obviously, 
upon the self revealed. In the personality of Hazlitt 
there is certainly no lack of interest. We see in his 
essays an intellect disciplined and broadened by 
long thought, enriched by the best reading and by 
early and intimate acquaintance with two or three 
of the ablest men of that generation ; a vivid imagina- 
tion and a quick eye for beauty; a temper flashing 
into anger at opposition or softened to melancholy 
by failure, yet constant to the ideals of youth; a 
vein of perversity which always liked the back side of 
a truth and the under side of a quarrel; and a gift 
of phrase ranging from caustic epigram to lofty 
eloquence. And in his egotism there is no Byronic 
posing nor any braggart quality; it is frank, naive, 
almost unconscious. 

Some of these miscellaneous essays are on philo- 
sophic themes; as, Why Distant Objects Please, On 

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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Personal Identity, On the Past and Future, On the 
Feeling of Immortality in Youth. Yet they are as 
genuinely autobiographical as the others. There 
is keen penetration, subtle analysis in plenty, but 
mixed with Hazlitt's sardonic humor, colored by 
his personal feelings, illustrated from his own 
experience. He was always fond of speculation 
upon the laws of conduct. He said that he had left 
off reading at an early age ; but he had been watching 
the human comedy intently all his days, and his 
power of psychological analysis was very acute. 
He likes to expose the unfamiliar side of some 
familiar truth, to break up our self-satisfied common- 
place, to explode a paradox under some smug pro- 
priety. He has in memory rich stores of example, 
and he constantly enlivens an abstract discussion 
with some shrewd bit of observation or bright 
gleam of fancy. In this subtle, imaginative, half- 
cynical philosophy of everyday life no other Eng- 
lish essayist is so great a master. His pages sparkle 
with truths of character and conduct cast into striking 
aphorisms or epigrams, often with an edge of satire. 

"We enjoy a friend's society only in proportion 
as he is satisfied with ours." 

"To look down upon anything seemingly implies 
a greater elevation and enlargement of view than 
to look up to it." 

68 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

"An excess of modesty is, in effect, an excess of 
pride." 

" Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity 
and afraid of being overtaken by it." 

"A woman's attachment to her husband is not to 
be suspected if she will allow no one to abuse him but 
herself." 

" There appears to be no natural necessity for evil, but 
that there is a perfect indifference to good without it.' 

" We never do anything well until we cease to think 
about the manner of doing it." 

"An Englishman is sure to speak his mind more 
plainly than others — yes, if it will give you more 
pain to hear it." 

Such pithy statements were not carefully studied 
for rhetorical effect. Hazlitt was never ambitious of 
mere smartness. But he did like to put the extreme 
case, to show some fact of human nature in unfamiliar 
and unexpected relations. He confesses a tendency 
to "chase my ideas into paradox or mysticism." For 
a paradox is not a falsehood which seems true, but 
a truth that seems false; and in that guise it often 
gains admission where truth in homespun common- 
place would be ignored or turned away. 

But the most striking and characteristic passages 
in these philosophical essays are those in which 
Hazlitt — to use his phrase again — chases his 

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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

idea, not into paradox, but into mysticism. He was 
always haunted by some sense of the mystery that 
touches our practical life at every point, the unfathom- 
able depth of meaning in our common speech. At 
the suggestion of a simple incident or familiar word, 
he may pass into a mood of solemn wonder and imag- 
ining. Thus, for example, the problem of the essen- 
tial nature of Time, the little instant marked off for 
each of us as by the bounds of Birth and Death from 
the Eternities, had always a strange fascination for 
him. " That things should be that are now no more, 
creates in my mind," he says, "the most profound 
astonishment. I cannot solve the mystery of the 
past, nor exhaust my pleasure in it." In his moods 
of reflection upon this world-old mystery, though he 
never preached, his writing takes on a solemn yet 
impassioned dignity of movement and imagery that 
sets it beside our very noblest prose. Such a sen- 
tence as this, with its heaped-up statement of all the 
possibilities of life suddenly smitten across by the 
stroke of annihilation, reminds us of Jeremy Taylor. 

"To see the golden sun, the azure sky, the out- 
stretched ocean; to walk upon the green earth and 
be lord of a thousand creatures ; to look down yawn- 
ing precipices or over distant sunny vales ; to see the 
world spread out under one's feet as a map ; to bring 
the stars near ; to view the smallest insects through a 

70 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

microscope; to read history, and consider the revo- 
lutions of empire and the successions of generations ; 
to hear of the glory of Tyre, of Sidon, of Babylon, 
of Susa, and to say all these were before me, and are 
now nothing ; to say I exist in such a point of time, 
and in such a point of space ; to be a spectator and a 
part of its ever moving scene ; to witness the change 
of season, of spring and autumn, of winter and sum- 
mer ; to feel hot and cold, pleasure and pain, beauty 
and deformity, right and wrong; to be sensible to 
the accidents of nature; to consider the mighty 
world of eye and ear; to listen to the stock-dove's 
notes amid the forest deep ; to journey over moor and 
mountain; to hear the midnight sainted choir; to 
visit lighted halls, or the cathedral's gloom, or sit in 
crowded theatres and see life itself mocked ; to study 
the works of art, and refine the sense of beauty to 
agony ; to worship fame, and dream of immortality ; 
to look upon the Vatican, and to read Shakespeare; 
to gather up the wisdom of the ancients, and to pry 
into the future; to listen to the trump of war, the 
shout of victory ; to question history as to the move- 
ments of the human heart; to seek for truth; to 
plead the cause of humanity; to overlook the world 
as if time and nature poured their treasures at our 
feet, — to be and to do all this, and then in a moment 
to be nothing — to have it all snatched from us as by 
a juggler's trick or a phantasmagoria!" 

7i 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

The most entertaining of all the essays, however, 
and probably the most familiar, are in a still more 
intimate, personal manner. Sometimes they are 
made up entirely of reminiscence, like the familiar 
essay on My First Acquaintance with Poets, 
quoted at the beginning of this paper, or that well- 
known account of the evening in Lamb's chambers, 
On People One would Wish to have Seen. But 
more frequently Hazlitt takes a topic that starts some 
train of reflection or gratifies some pet animosity, 
and talks a half-hour, On Reading Old Books, On the 
Look of a Gentleman, On Disagreeable People, On 
the Pleasures of Hating, or on Painting. You do not 
go to such writing as this for instruction or for in- 
spiration ; but instruction is usually a bore, and what 
professes to be inspiration is often only irritation. 
Yet Hazlitt's papers are never made up of languid 
revery or idle gossip. He is always giving some sud- 
den fillip to your thinking. This writing is a revela- 
tion of an active, nervous mind. The familiar 
relations of society, the old anxieties, affections, 
hopes, and disappointments of common life, he sets in 
picturesque circumstance, and invests them all with 
his own emotion. These essays are his criticism of 
life. And not by any means an altogether unwhole- 
some criticism of life, I should say. Doubtless his 
predominant moods are not buoyant or optimistic. 
He enjoys poor health, and is a little over-severe on 

72 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

the red, rotund, thick-skinned, average British man. 
He was a little too much inclined to make a virtue 
of his own aversions, and to mistake his own suspi- 
cion and ill-nature for stern fidelity to principle. 
"No good-natured man," he says, "was ever martyr 
to a cause" — like himself. But he is always pi- 
quant, original, and commands our interest for his 
opinions, if not our assent. The whims and petty 
perversities that doubtless made him difficult as a 
friend make him delightful as a writer. For he was 
no real cynic or misanthrope. He kept his ideals 
noble and sound. To be sure, he had sometimes 
idealized the wrong persons — Sarah Walker and 
Napoleon Bonaparte, for example; and the result 
was unfortunate for his temper when he discovered 
his error, and unfortunate for his reputation when he 
did not. But his thoughts and memory dwelt habit- 
ually upon things honest and lovely, and of good 
report. He never jeers at virtue, and he has no cynic 
scorn for his early dreams. On the contrary, all the 
best of these papers have a backward glance of fond 
reminiscence. His favorite phrase is "I remember." 
He might have said with Wordsworth, 

"The thought of our past years in me doth breed 
Perpetual benediction." 

But with a difference. For, out of all his memories, 
Hazlitt, like Jacques (of whom I have often thought 

73 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

he must have been a reincarnation) , can suck melan- 
choly as a weasel sucks eggs. It is not the mourn- 
ful melancholy of a sated voluptuary, or the sour 
melancholy of a selfish cynic; it is the gentle regret 
for the early days of books and friends and hopes. 
He himself evidently takes a serene satisfaction in 
it; and it softens all his angry or querulous moods 
into the twilight tones of recollection. You shall not 
read far without coming upon some passage of genu- 
inely poetic vision and feeling — glimpses of that 
kind of retreat he loved best, not rugged or remote, 
but in some softer solitude, as at Winterslow, hallowed 
by old associations, and in sound of village bells; 
memories of scenes he knew, or friends he loved, or 
books he read. He hears the sound of the curfew 
he heard when a boy 

"Swinging slow with sullen roar," 

and the generations that are gone, the tangled forest 
glades and hamlets brown of his native country, the 
woodman's art, the Norman warrior armed for battle, 
the conqueror's iron rule, and the peasant's lamp ex- 
tinguished, all start into memory at that clamorous 
peal. He recalls the time, when, in the inn at Tewks- 
bury, he sat up the livelong night to read Paul and 
Virginia; the place where he first read Mrs. Inch- 
bald's Simple Story, " while an old crazy hand-organ 
outside was playing Robin Adair, and a summer 

74 



WILLIAM HAZLITT 

shower dropped manna on my head"; or that hour 
when first the great Mrs. Siddons passed before his 
sight and shook his soul to tears. In such passages 
his writing has all the charms of poetry save only 
the accomplishment of verse. 

It would be idle to claim for Hazlitt a place among 
those writers who have greatly added to the knowl- 
edge, or influenced the thought, of their time. His 
work is not, like that of Carlyle or Ruskin or even of 
Arnold, so dominated by urgent moral purpose as to 
make it an efficient spiritual force. Nor can it be 
said that in the whole body of his writing there is any 
one thing that for weight of thought or perfection of 
structure can take highest rank as literature. But 
it is safe to say that, as a master of style and as a 
critic of literature, he had no superior in his own day, 
and has had very few since. And his miscellaneous 
writings will have a perennial charm as a storehouse 
of the fancies, the humors, the poetry and wisdom, 
the opinions and prejudices, the friendships and en- 
mities of the man William Hazlitt. Every page is 
the utterance of his unique personality. He may 
have been "gey ill to live with"; but few men have 
known how to write more companionable books. 
Readers who ask first of all that a book shall have a 
live man in it will keep his volumes always within 
easy reach, on the same shelf with Elia and Boswell. 

75 



CHARLES LAMB 



It seems idle to sit down to write an essay on 
Charles Lamb. As Hazlitt remarks somewhere, 
"There is nothing to be said respecting an author 
that all the world have made up their minds about." 
It is perhaps, also, a little dangerous, as well as idle ; 
the average reader is likely to resent the assumption 
that any one is better acquainted with Elia than he is. 
For Charles Lamb belongs to the small group of 
authors for whom we cherish a kindly feeling that 
precludes any cool, critical estimate. They may be 
great writers, or they may not ; they are good fellows. 
There are not many such. Cicero's famous praise 
of books that invigorate our youth and delight our 
age, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant 
nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur, is by no means 
true of all good literature. Who takes up the 
Paradise Lost to read in that half-hour before he 
blows out his bedside candle, or tucks the Decline 
and Fall into his valise as he is starting upon a 
journey? These great men are not for all hours. 
But old Howell, and Izaak Walton, and Dick Steele, 

76 



CHARLES LAMB 

and Oliver Goldsmith, and Sam Johnson in Boswell, 
these are of that company of friends to whom we 
need no critic's introduction. And of this company 
probably most readers would pronounce Charles 
Lamb most familiar and most dear. 

We may be sure, indeed, that there must have been 
some unusual power in any personality that can thus 
transmit its charm through the generations ; but we 
do not care to apply to his work the methods of 
critical analysis. Moreover, the critic, especially 
if he be a student of literary evolution, with an itch 
for explaining things, is likely to find himself put 
about by Lamb. Because Lamb is not to be ac- 
counted for. He doesn't fit into any theory. He 
doesn't illustrate anything. In describing the course 
of literary tendencies you don't quite know where to 
put him. He might as well have lived in the early 
part of the seventeenth century as in the early part 
of the nineteenth; in fact, after five o'clock in the 
afternoon he usually did live in the early part of the 
seventeenth century. He was fourteen years old 
when the French Revolution broke out, and the tumult 
of that movement, with its long reverberations in 
every department of thought, filled England all his 
days ; but you may read his books and letters without 
guessing that there ever was a revolution in France — 
or anywhere else. Some of the intimates of his man- 
hood were very rigid conservatives, like Wordsworth 

77 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

and Southey ; one or two were admirers of Napoleon, 
like Hazlitt; some were extreme doctrinaire revo- 
lutionists, like Godwin; but he neither contested 
their opinions nor adopted them. In himself the 
elements were so mixed as to make a personality 
quite unique, not to be classified, and not to be 
mapped neatly out in an essay. 

Doubtless Lamb lives in our imagination chiefly 
as a humorist. Everybody knows a score of good 
stories of him, of his whimsicalities of speech and 
manner, his droll jests, his execrable — and irre- 
sistible — puns. We picture him clad in black, like 
some nervous parson, slipping down Fleet Street of a 
morning, on fragile legs, — those "immaterial legs," 
as Tom Hood called them, — to his day's work at the 
desk in the India House. Getting there a little late, 
very likely; but, as he said, "I m-make up for that 
b-by going away early." Or it is on one of those 
Wednesday evenings in the little room up three flights 
in the Temple buildings, when the cold ham and ale 
are on the table, and the door opens to let in Hazlitt, 
and Godwin, and Procter, and Burney, and Rickman, 
and Ayrton; and perhaps, on some rare and famed 
occasion, the heavy form of Coleridge himself comes 
toiling uncertainly up the stair, and his great 
forehead, like the dome of Paul's in the babble of 
London, throws a high dignity over the company. 
Or, perhaps, one likes best of all to think of him in 

78 



CHARLES LAMB 

one of those long evenings at home with Mary, the 
sister, at one side of the table writing (it may 
be one of her Tales from Shakespeare), and the 
brother opposite in a halo of smoke — he is certainly 
going to leave off tobacco next week — reading in 
some tall folio first edition he has just brought home 
in triumph, with the feeling of recklessness that 
follows an extravagant purchase. But wherever he 
may be, there is, if not always mirth, always humor, 
and a good humor. His laughter was not like the 
crackling of thorns under a pot, but genial, kindly, 
wise. He knew how by a jest, a waggish remark, 
half drollery and half sympathy, to break up the crust 
of commonplace that gathers over our thought, to 
enliven the lead-colored monotony that makes life toil- 
some and — what is worse — prosaic. And the abil- 
ity to do this surely is one of the best gifts of genius. 
Yet, after all, it is not, I think, his humor that 
shows most strikingly in Lamb's life, but what, for 
want of a more precise name, I should call heroism — 
an undemonstrative, silent, and supremely difficult 
virtue. In truth, he knows but little of Lamb who 
cannot discern at the core of his character steadfast 
resolution, patient endurance. His whole life was a 
discipline of self-denial and renunciation. From 
boyhood he was a scholar, with a love for the tradi- 
tions of learning and the charm of letters. At 
Christ's Hospital he instinctively selected as his closest 

79 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

friend that one bluecoat boy who carried better brains 
than any other lad of his years in England. Yet 
when he left school, in 1792, Lamb could not follow 
this friend Coleridge to the University, but, at the age 
of sixteen, must begin his lifelong slavery to "the 
desk's dull wood." It may have been fortunate for 
us that he was thus " defrauded of the sweet food of 
academic institution," and forced to that harder 
and more varied experience out of which came the 
subtle, half-pathetic humor of Elia ; but any one who 
has read the delightful paper Oxford in Vacation 
knows how keenly Lamb felt the loss all his days. 

Then, in September, 1796, came the solemn trag- 
edy of his life — that black day when there fell upon 
his sister Mary the first of those visitations to recur 
so often through all her after years, and in sudden 
frenzy she took the life of her mother. Lamb gave 
up at once all other plans and hopes and loves to 
provide for his sister. Nothing could be nobler 
than the quiet, self-forgetful temper in which he 
accepted that lifelong charge, excusing the selfish 
indifference of his elder brother who should have 
shared it, and esteeming his exclusive care of Mary 
not a burden, but a privilege. He knew that this 
duty must set him apart in many ways from his 
old friends and associations. That poem, the Old 
Familiar Faces, surely one of the most pathetic 
in our literature, was not written near the close of 

80 



CHARLES LAMB 

his life, but near its beginning, when he was but 
twenty-three years old; and recounts the sense of 
loneliness and isolation with which he fronted the 
coming years : — 

"I have had playmates, I have had companions, 
In the days of childhood, in my joyful schooldays, 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 



"Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, 
Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling? 
So might we talk of the old familiar faces — 

"How some they have died, and some they have left me, 
And some are taken from me ; all are departed ; 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." 

We can never know how much that tender and watch- 
ful devotion to his sister, through thirty-six years, 
cost Charles Lamb. He lived in constant anxiety 
for her, fearful now of too much excitement and now 
of too much monotony, and always dreading the 
oft-recurring summons for their separation. " Don't 
say anything, when you write, about our low spirits," 
writes Mary to Sarah Stoddard; " it will vex Charles. 
You would laugh, or you would cry, perhaps both, 
to see us sit together, looking at each other with long 
and rueful faces, and saying, 'How do you do?' and 
'How do you do?' and then we fall a-crying and 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

say we will be better on the morrow. Charles says 
we are like tooth-ache and his friend gum-boil, which 
though a kind of ease is an uneasy kind of ease.' , 
But it was only to a few of his nearest friends, like 
Coleridge and Wordsworth, that Lamb would make 
any mention of his anxieties; and to them almost 
always in a tone of cheer. Once only, after the re- 
pulse of his boyish attachment for Anne Simmons, 
did he allow himself to think of any other love so 
near as Mary's — and then only for a few hours. 
One lonely day in 1819, his long-cherished friendship 
for that charming actress and large-hearted woman, 
Fanny Kelly, so far got the better of his prudence 
that he wrote her a proposal of marriage. When 
she declined it, with a grace and kindness worthy 
herself, Lamb sat down at once and wrote the fol- 
lowing note : — 

" Dear Miss Kelly, — Your injunctions shall be 
obeyed to a tittle. I feel myself in a lackadaisical, 
no-how-ish kind of humor. I believe it is the rain 
or something. I had thought to have written seri- 
ously, but I fancy I succeed best in epistles of mere 
fun; puns and that nonsense. You will be good 
friends with us, will you not? Let what has past 
'break no bones' between us. 

" Yours very truly, 
" C. L. 
82 



CHARLES LAMB 

" Do you not observe the delicacy of not signing 
my full name? 

"N.B. Do not paste that last letter of mine into 
your Book." 

Nobody will question the verdict of Lamb's best 
biographer, Mr. Lucas, that there is no better letter 
than that in English literature, "nor, in its instant 
acceptance of defeat, its brave half-smiling admission 
that yet another dream was shattered, one more 
pathetic." 

Through all those years Lamb never complained ; 
he never railed at the universe ; he never put on any 
airs of heroic endurance or virtuous resignation. He 
bore his burdens and did his duty like a man. Some 
of the most characteristic phases of his humor, when 
closely scanned, turn out to be only the obverse of 
this manly sincerity and endurance. Just because 
life was to him so serious a matter, he took delight 
in upsetting those people who are always mistaking 
stupidity for seriousness and dulness for dignity. 
He had perhaps too little patience with those aggres- 
sively earnest folk, bent on improving their minds 
or souls — and ours ; especially worthy women of 
that kind, who have missions and ideas and all that 
sort of thing. There is a racy letter in which he tells 
Coleridge of an evening he and his sister have en- 
dured tea-drinking with one of Coleridge's admirers, 

83 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

a Miss Benje or Benjay, who discussed Hannah More 
and Pope's poetry and Doctor Gregory, and defended 
the opinion that differences of human intellect are 
the effect of organization. "I attempted to carry it 
off with a pun on organ, but it went off very flat, 
and she immediately conceived a very low opinion of 
my metaphysics, and turning to Mary, put some 
question to her in French, probably having heard 
that neither Mary nor I understand French." 

So, too, his healthy dislike for all affectations of 
sensibility often gave a rude shock to the soft senti- 
mentalists. "Mr. Lamb," said a lady to him, "I 
think so highly of my pastor, because I know him so 
well; you don't know him, Mr. Lamb, but I know 
him so well." "N-no, madam," said Lamb, "I 
d-don't know him; but d-damn him at a venture, 
madam, d-damn him at a venture!" For himself 
he had an almost hysterical dread of seeming to 
invite a condescending sympathy or approval. He 
refused to be pitied. "For God's sake," he wrote 
Coleridge, "don't make me ridiculous any more 
by terming me 'gentle-hearted' in print;" and, in 
his next letter, "blot out 'gentle-hearted' and sub- 
stitute drunken-dog, ragged-head, seld-shaven, odd- 
eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly 
and properly belongs to the gentleman in question." 
Genuinely bashful, afraid of being misunderstood, 
when he deemed his listener either hostile or patroniz- 

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CHARLES LAMB 

ing, he sometimes took a perverse pleasure in making 
himself as disagreeable or as inane as possible. It 
was the contrariness of the boy in him. Patmore said 
that to those who didn't know him, or knowing, 
could not or did not appreciate him, he passed for 
"something between an imbecile, a brute, and a 
buffoon." One can well imagine his mood when 
confronted with the grim rigor of Mr. Thomas 
Carlyle. Yet his most audacious impudence was 
oftenest put on to cover his own tenderness, or to 
prevent some over-effusiveness from his friends. 
"My sister Mary," he said on introducing her to 
Tom Hood. " Allow me to introduce my sister Mary, 
she is a very good woman, but she d-drinks !" Un- 
derneath all this whimsicality there was a foundation 
of patient, unselfish endurance. His humor is like 
his smile; a quizzical yet appealing smile, behind 
which, they tell us, there always seemed a tender 
background of far-away sadness — traces of the toil 
and struggle of his life seen through whatever mask 
the humor of the hour might put on. "His serious 
conversation, like his serious writing," says Hazlitt, 
" is his best. His jests scald like tears, and he probes 
a question with a play upon words." The heroism 
of such a life, I should say, is of a higher and harder 
sort than Mr. Carlyle's loud heroism of eloquence. 
There is no need to deny Lamb his frailties. He 
doubtless exaggerated his own vices, and he took a 
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pleasure in mystifying proper persons by confessing 
lapses of which he was never guilty; but everybody 
knows that he was always, in Mary's phrase, rather 
smoky, and sometimes rather drinky. As he owned, 
he kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. We 
may admit, too, that in his last years the resolute, 
persistent whimsicality of the worn old man was now 
and then almost painful. He was a little too impa- 
tient of the decorum of years; a little too prone to 
attempt by sheer frivolity to escape the ineluctable 
demands of age. But he must be either a very 
blind or a very sour-spirited critic who cannot see 
that these failings were mostly the result of the tragic 
circumstance of his life. He was by nature a genial, 
rather than a jovial, man, select rather than indis- 
criminate in his friendships. I do not find that in 
his early years he had any intimate friends besides 
Coleridge. But after insanity fell upon Mary, he 
felt himself forced to seek wider and more jovial 
companionship that he might escape the gloom and 
monotony of his life, and the danger of such life for 
her. Some of the acquaintances he picked up while 
he was slaving for London journals were poor devils 
like Fell and Fenwick, who could make but slender 
claim either to ability or to morals ; but Lamb, at 
all events, was attracted by what was best in them, 
and he never admitted them to the circle of his inti- 
mates. He loved the humors of life, and always 

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CHARLES LAMB 

preferred in his friends some flavor of originality 
to prosaic common sense. As he says in that acute 
piece of self-analysis, the Preface to the Second 
Edition of the Elia Essays: — 

"He chose his companions for some individuality 
of character which they manifested. His intimates, 
to confess a truth, were in the world's eye a ragged 
regiment. He found them floating on the surface of 
society ; and the color, or something else, in the weed 
pleased him. The burrs stuck to him — but they 
were good and loving burrs for all that. He never 
greatly cared for the society of what are called good 
people." 

George Dyer, Martin Burney, Jem White, Thomas 
Manning, William Ayrton — what an interesting 
company of eccentrics they form; and we should 
hardly have known them at all had we not met them 
at Lamb's hospitable bachelor table. And besides 
them there is a goodly company of friends not un- 
known to fame, Hazlitt, Procter, Crabb Robinson, 
Tom Hood, Cowden Clark, Leigh Hunt, and the 
rest. To say truth, Lamb had a genius for friend- 
ship. He could discover something amiable in every- 
body. He drew about him men who were polar 
opposites in temperament and bitterly antagonistic 
in opinion; men like Godwin and Wordsworth, 

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Hunt and Sou they, who would never have given a 
hand to each other save on the common ground of 
their friendship for Lamb. He stoutly defended them 
to each other, and appreciated whatever was genuine 
and human in them all. He made free with their 
follies, quizzed them on their fads or peculiarities 
with an impudence that might have been intolerable 
in any one else. " M-martin," he stammered out over 
the whist table to Burney, "if d-dirt were trumps, 
what a hand you'd hold!" When Coleridge talked 
a stricken hour, wrapped in a cloud of lofty meta- 
physic, Lamb only remarked dryly, "Coleridge is 
so full of his fun !" But no one took offence. In- 
deed no one could be more quick than Lamb him- 
self to perceive, or more careful to avoid, anything 
that might wound the feelings of others. Men who, 
like Hazlitt, quarrelled with everybody else, never 
could quarrel with him. It was Charles and Mary 
Lamb, and one may say only they, that could keep 
the friendship of William Hazlitt and Sarah Stoddard, 
not only before their ill-assorted marriage, — at 
which ceremony Lamb confessed he was convulsed 
with mistimed laughter, — but when, in the later 
days, they were separated from each other and from 
everybody else. Charles and Mary Lamb would 
cherish no resentment for any slight, or misunder- 
standing, or desertion. When Hazlitt lay in his last 
illness alone and unbefriended, it was Lamb who 

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CHARLES LAMB 

hastened to visit him, stood by his bedside, and held 
the hand of the dying man to the end. 

But it should be remembered that Lamb's best and 
closest friends were precisely the best and greatest 
men of his time. He was surrounded by an oddly 
assorted company on the Wednesday evenings ; but 
he kept his closest intimacy for two or three — for 
Coleridge and the Wordsworths. There are few 
letters in the language like those of Lamb to the 
Wordsworths, so full of mingled humor and pathos, 
of the most delicate sympathies. These people really 
knew each other — which is too uncommon a thing 
in this world. And this is Lamb's last letter to Cole- 
ridge, written probably, as Mr. Dykes Campbell sug- 
gests, to remove some mistaken, sick man's fancy : — 

" My dear Coleridge, — Not one unkind thought 
has passed in my brain about you. ... If you ever 
thought an offence, much more wrote it against me, it 
must have been in the times of Noah, and the great 
waters swept it away. Mary's most kind love, and 
maybe a wrong prophet of your bodings ! — here she 
is crying for mere love over your letter. I wring out 
less, but not sincerer, showers." 

Two years later, Coleridge, at the end of his weary 
illness, turning over the pages of his early poems, 
comes upon that one, The Lime-Tree Bower My 
Prison, written during the visit of Charles and Mary 

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Lamb to Nether Stowey, so long ago, when they were 
all young and happy; and he writes under it: "Ch. 
and Mary Lamb — dear to my heart, yea, as it 
were my heart. S. T. C. JEt 63, 1834. 1797-1834, 
37 years!" When he died, Lamb went broken- 
hearted, murmuring to himself, "Coleridge is dead, 
Coleridge is dead!" In almost his last recorded 
lines he writes: "His great and dear spirit haunts 
me. I cannot make a criticism on men and books 
without an ineffectual turning and reference to him." 
And a few days later he followed his old familiar 
friend. I say it warms the heart to think of such a 
friendship as this, and makes us deem more nobly 
of human nature. Thomas Carlyle, seeing Lamb 
in those last years, notes in him "insuperable pro- 
clivity to gin"; judges there is "a most slender fibre 
of actual worth in that poor Charles." William 
Wordsworth, writing a few months after Lamb had 
gone, cries out — 

" O he was good, if e'er a good man lived ! " 
So blindly may the jaundiced cynic misinterpret the 
man whom the wise poet understands. 

II 

Literature, it must be remembered, was always an 
avocation to Lamb. His Works were mostly written 
at the desk's dull wood, where he labored eight — 

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CHARLES LAMB 

sometimes nine or ten — hours a day, six days in a 
week, with only a short vacation in summer, for 
thirty-six years. In the eighteenth century it used 
to be thought difficult to be in literature — or in 
love — and yet attend to business. Pope has some 
rather mean flings at 

"The clerk foredoomed his father's soul to cross, 
Who pens a stanza when he should engross." 

But in later years it has been found there is neither 
difficulty nor discredit in such a combination. Lamb 
is among the first in a long succession of writers — 
Rogers, Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, William 
Morris, Edmund Gosse, Austin Dobson, Maurice 
Hewlett, and others — who have managed to unite 
business and literature without detriment to either. 
For Lamb, at all events, such a position — save that 
his hours were too long — was doubtless fortunate. 
It gave him regular employment which occupied, 
without overtaxing, his thought ; it gave certain and 
definite remuneration which put him beyond the reach 
of serious financial anxiety. But a life so confining 
left not much leisure for literary work ; and this may 
be one reason why, all through his early years, Lamb 
produced so little. The Elia Essays, which to 
most people stand for Lamb's work, were written 
after he was forty-five years old ; and all his writing 
before the Elia Essays fills only two thin volumes. 

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But it is not chiefly the confinement of his work 
at the India House that explains this scantiness of 
product during the early years; for the Elia Essays 
themselves were mostly written in the years 1820 
and 182 1, when his duties in the counting room were 
most onerous. The truth is, rather, that up to 
1820 he had not really found his vein. His earliest 
literary aspiration was to be a poet rather than an 
essayist. Four sonnets from his pen were included 
in Coleridge's first volume of verse, published in 
1796, and the second edition of that volume, next 
year, contained a considerable number of short 
poems by Lamb. The sonnet form, then for a 
long time unfamiliar in English verse, he probably 
borrowed from Bowles, to whose work he had been 
introduced by Coleridge. In sentiment, too, by 
their gentle grace touched with a placid melancholy, 
these sonnets may remind us of Bowles. Some 
fragmentary pieces of blank verse show plainly 
the influence of Milton and especially of Cowper, 
whom Lamb in those early days greatly admired. 
"I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton," 
he wrote Coleridge in 1796, "but I would not call 
that man my friend who should be offended with the 
divine chit-chat of Cowper." Burns, also, had been 
for some years, he declared, the god of his idolatry; 
but I can see no trace whatever in this early verse 
of the vigor, passion, or humor of the Scotch poet. 

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CHARLES LAMB 

Nearly all the poetry before 1800 came out of the 
trials of his own life, the hapless love for the " fair- 
haired Anna" and the tragedy of his sister's mad- 
ness. Much of it is in a tone of half-despondent 
but pious resignation, but with little of Lamb's 
peculiar fancy and altogether without humor. It is 
all sincere, but only once — in the Old Familiar 
Faces — do we get the note of sheer intense emotion, 
that without the aid of imagery, rhyme, or definite 
metre, shapes his lines into truest poetry. The 
album verses and the occasional poetry of his later 
years are most of them, like the early work, in re- 
flective or pathetic, not in humorous, tone. We 
recognize frequently in them the quaint fancy of the 
seventeenth-century men of whom he was so fond; 
in one or two instances the union of subtle or ingen- 
ious thought with deep tenderness of feeling makes a 
poem of striking quality. Such lines, for instance, 
as those he sent to Tom Hood on the death of his 
child, On an Infant dying as soon as Born, could 
hardly have been written by any other poet of the 
nineteenth century; to find anything like them you 
must go back to Wither or Crashaw. One or two of 
the later poems, however, have nothing of this 
archaic manner, but, like the Old Familiar Faces, 
show that unconsciousness of utter sincerity which 
is the last charm of lyric verse. The lines to Hester 
Savory, the sprightly and comely Quaker girl that 

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caught his fancy while he was living at Pentonville, 

"When maidens such as Hester die," 
once read, can never be forgotten. Lamb had but 
slender poetic gift, doubtless; yet he wrote two or 
three lyrics of keen emotional power, and the subtle 
charm of his personality frequently gave to his 
more trivial and fragmentary verse an interest 
which the critic hardly knows how to justify. 

Much the same may be said of his early story, 
Rosamund Gray. One might expect, from its plot 
and its chief actors, this little romance to be a crude 
mixture of tragedy and sentimentality. The villain 
is a quite impossible person whom Lamb got out of 
his reading; he bears the name of one of the 
murderers in Marlowe's Edward Second, and really 
has no character at all, being a kind of diabolus 
ex machina. Rosamund Gray, the heroine, is one of 
the helpless, innocent maidens so common in senti- 
mental fiction after Richardson. The action is 
baldly melodramatic. Yet into this improbable 
story Lamb has put so much of his native delicacy of 
feeling, and he has told it with such an artless, old- 
fashioned grace of style, as to make it altogether 
delightful, if not altogether convincing. Its opening 
words strike the note that is sustained throughout: 

" It was noon-tide. The sun was very hot. An old 
gentlewoman sat spinning in a little arbor at the 

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CHARLES LAMB 

door of her cottage. She was blind ; and her grand- 
daughter was reading the Bible to her. The old lady 
had just left her work to attend to the story of Ruth." 

The Rosamund Gray, moreover, has special bio- 
graphical interest. It was written just after Lamb 
had been forced to relinquish thoughts of any 
woman's love save his sister's, and it is touched 
with the pathos of that resignation. Rosamund 
Gray, the mild-eyed maid whom everybody loved, 
whose hair fell in bright and circling clusters, is 
evidently Lamb's "fair Alice W." More than a 
quarter-century afterwards, in that charming essay, 

Blakesmoor in H shire, in describing an old 

portrait, he speaks of the bright yellow Hertford- 
shire hair, "so like my Alice." The lover in the 
story, Allen Clare, and his sister Eleanor are Charles 
and Mary Lamb; old blind Margaret is their 
grandmother, Mrs. Field, whose picture Lamb had 
already drawn in one of his early poems; while the 
scenery of the tale is that of the home of the fair 
Alice, the tiny village of Widmore in Hertfordshire, 
which he described so lovingly long afterwards in 
the Blakesmoor essay. 

A lover of drama and the stage from boyhood, it 
was natural that Lamb should try his hand at dra- 
matic composition. But he never succeeded. In 
truth, he was without the first requisites of success. 

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He had little creative imagination, and he had no 
constructive ability. He could not conceive or por- 
tray original characters; he could not invent effec- 
tive situations. His farce, Mr. H., which he had 
hoped might be a stage success, was promptly 
damned before the first representation was half 
over — as it deserved to be. Lamb himself, though 
chapfallen over his failure, had sense enough to 
hiss among the loudest. The motive — the troubles 
of a man who endeavors to conceal his name, Hogs- 
flesh — is too puerile even for farce ; and the changes 
are rung on the unfortunate word with dreary repe- 
tition. Lamb had not the gift to write a brilliant 
or witty dialogue. He could not get out of him- 
self; and his own humor, the humor of Elia, is too 
subtle, too peculiarly his own for the broad and 
obvious effects that comedy demands. Nor is the 
tragedy, John Woodvil, much more successful. 
It is dignified and serious, and its manner here and 
there so close an imitation of the Elizabethans that 
Godwin, coming upon some lines from it, was sure 
he had seen them in Beaumont and Fletcher. But 
it has no real characters, no action, and no adequate 
motive for any action. And while the style, in 
some passages, may remind us by diction and 
rhythm of our elder drama, it has nothing of the 
passion and intensity which characterized that large 
utterance of the early gods. 

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CHARLES LAMB 

In fact, as Mr. Ainger suggests, John Woodvil 
is of interest chiefly as showing how thoroughly 
Lamb had already immersed himself in our Eliza- 
bethan drama. The riper fruits of that study were 
seen in the volume of Specimens from English 
Dramatic Poets, which appeared in 1808. This 
well-known book, though it is a florilegium from 
the older drama with comparatively little comment 
by Lamb, is probably his most important, as it is 
his best-known, contribution to literary criticism. We 
should remember that in 1808 the great body of 
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was practically 
unknown to intelligent readers. Coleridge's lec- 
tures did not touch the drama outside of Shakespeare 
until 1818; Hazlitt's course on the drama was not 
given until 1821. There were, indeed, some indica- 
tions of a reviving interest in the drama, as in all 
our older and romantic literature. Gifford's first 
edition of Massinger was published in 1805; in 
181 1, three years after Lamb's book, Weber issued 
his edition of Ford, warmly commended by Jeffrey 
in the Edinburgh. Yet it may be truthfully said 
that it was Lamb, rather than any one else, who 
first led the average well-read Englishman to think 
he ought to know something of Beaumont and 
Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, Heywood, Webster. 
Since his time these old masters have received, 
perhaps, quite as much praise as they deserve. 
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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

And for this over-commendation, too, Lamb's 
book is largely responsible. In truth, whoever forms 
his estimate of the elder drama from Lamb's speci- 
mens will be likely to get an exaggerated idea of 
its merits. He was captivated by the large imagina- 
tion in the speech of these men and by their power 
to show the human soul in its moods of struggle or 
endurance, beside which the polished convention- 
alities of later writers seem tame and flat. But 
his extracts represent their work only at its high 
points, and give no idea of its crudity and violence, 
its morbid passion and its frequent distortions of 
character and motive. 

Everywhere, indeed, Lamb's criticism is selective, ^ 
the criticism of appreciation rather than of impar- 
tial estimate. He pays little attention to the meaning 
and temper of the work as a whole. He does not 
balance merits and defects; he culls out passages 
pleasing to linger over with deliberate, prolonged 
satisfaction. He treated his books as he treated his 
friends — enjoyed whatever in them was true or 
original, overlooked or minimized their failings. 
The rule is perhaps better for friendship than for 
criticism; yet critical judgment of this sort, if less 
impartial, is more sympathetic and penetrating. 
For the same reason Lamb's criticism was not 
technical or academic, but moral. He cared little 
for mere form. He brought literature to the test 

9 s 



CHARLES LAMB 

of life. The author of a book, the characters in a 
book, were to him men to be liked or disliked, 
to be judged by the same standards we apply 
to our neighbors. That is what often makes a 
passing remark of Lamb's worth a half-dozen 
pages of analysis. Thus, in his rambling essay on 
Some of the Old Actors, the few lines in which 
he tells how Mrs. Jordan rendered Viola's dis- 
guised confession of love show Mrs. Jordan to 
have been an excellent actress, but they also reveal 
with the utmost delicacy of appreciation the emotion 
of Viola. In the same essay is incomparably the 
best interpretation of the character of Malvolio 
ever written — indeed the only just one that I know 
of. These persons were as real to Lamb's thought as 
Hazlitt or Manning; he loved to dwell on their 
peculiarities, to delight his sense of humor by re- 
calling all they say and do. And in every case it 
was Shakespeare's Malvolio or Viola that he knew, 
not some actor's. An inveterate playgoer, he never- 
theless felt the danger of forming acquaintance 
with Shakespeare's men and women on the stage 
rather than in the study of the imagination. This 
is the theme of that essay often thought so para- 
doxical from him, On the Tragedies of Shake- 
speare. Shakespeare's plays, he declares, are less 
suited for representation than almost any other, 
simply because there is in his work more of that 

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element that defies outward expression. In propor- 
tion as a play is laden with deep moral significance, 
in proportion as its inner meaning is more impor- 
tant than its outward action, just in that proportion 
is the player likely to give it a wrong emphasis. 
And this is true. 

Lamb's critical appreciation was curiously limited. 
Contemporary works, save those by his personal 
friends, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, he 
seldom looked into. "When a new book comes 
out," said he, "I read an old one." In those years 
all the world was reading and praising the poems 
and novels of Scott; I do not recall any mention of 
them by Lamb. Byron he detested as a man, and 
refused to read him — " he is great in so small a way. " 
Shelley's unsubstantial verse he could make nothing 
of. In truth, he did not much sympathize with any 
of the new romance. In the Elizabethans romance 
and adventure were fitting. They lived in an at- 
mosphere of imagination; the world they portrayed 
was their own world. But that a sober country 
gentleman who contributed to the Quarterly Review, 
or a dandy lord who was idolized by London 
society, should go so far afield into mediaevalism 
and orientalism for themes of song or story, that 
seemed to him labored and unnatural. For himself 
he liked the homely cockney ways of the town 
better; and no strange foreign strand had for him 

ioo 



CHARLES LAMB 

half the charms of that which runs from Charing 
Cross to Temple Bar. 

Lamb has a few very characteristic papers on the 
kindred art of painting. Perhaps the most ambitious 
of all his critical essays is that On the Genius of 
Hogarth. He makes no pretension to knowledge of 
the artist's technique; he judges a painting solely 
by what might be called its literary quality, its imagi- 
native power to suggest vividly some phase of human 
life. Another essay, On the Barrenness of the Imagi- 
native Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art, 
contains in its few pages more keenness and truth of 
vision than are found in many learned modern dis- 
cussions of realism and idealism. Contemporary 
art, Lamb complains, is content with empty pictorial 
effects, and quite powerless to tell anything imagi- 
natively. Not so the elder men. This essay begins 
with a description, or rather an interpretation, of 
Titian's great Bacchus and Ariadne in the National 
Gallery which makes no mention of Titian's glory of 
color, but indicates admirably that wealth of sugges- 
tion which seemed to Lamb the secret of art. 

" Is there anything in modern art — we will not 
demand that it should be equal — but in any way 
analogous to what Titian has effected in that wonder- 
ful bringing together of two times in the Ariadne in 
the National Gallery? Precipitous, with his reeling 

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Satyr rout about him, repeopling and reilluming 
suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fury 
beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, firelike 
flings himself at the Cretan. This is the time pres- 
ent. With this telling of the story an artist, and no 
ordinary one, might remain richly proud. Guido 
in his harmonious version of it saw no further. But 
from the depths of the imaginative spirit Titian has 
recalled past time, and laid it contributory with the 
present to one simultaneous effect. With the desert 
all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, 
made lucid with the presence and new offers of a god, 
— as if unconscious of Bacchus or but idly casting 
her eyes as upon some unconcerning pageant — her 
soul undistracted from Theseus, — Ariadne is still 
pacing the solitary shore, in as much heart silence 
and in almost the same local solitude, with which she 
awoke at daybreak to catch the forlorn last glances 
of the sail that bore away the Athenian." 

Most of Lamb's criticism, however, is fragmentary, 
informal ; much of it is scattered through his private 
correspondence, especially in the letters to Cole- 
ridge, Lloyd, and Wordsworth. There might be 
culled from his writings a volume of acute and 
stimulating literary comment. And it should be 
added that all this early work, whether poetry, story, 
or criticism, is written in an English chaste, simple, 
1 02 



CHARLES LAMB 

but not meagre, such as hardly any other prose- writer 
between 1790 and 18 10 could command. 

But, after all, we shall always think of Lamb not 
as poet or critic, but as humorist. And rightly. He 
was, indeed, at the farthest possible remove from that 
dreary person, the professional humorist. Of all 
humor his certainly is the most spontaneous and 
original. He was a species all by himself — a bundle 
of the most delightful and unaccountable whimsi- 
calities. He had the jester's love for pure nonsense, 
for the ridiculous, pure and simple. He will suggest 
with grave face some droll conceit, or tell some waggish 
story, that trips up the heels of your gravity by its 
sheer absurdity. Among his minor papers is an 
account of a fat woman in Oxford, — The Gentle Gi- 
antess, — that no man who isn't starched intolerably 
stiff can read without shaking in laughter, — pure 
farce told in the solemn phrase of Sir Thomas Browne. 
Of puns, which many people of weighty converse 
feel bound to depreciate, he was a very great master ; 
and the effect of his puns was doubled, as he very 
well knew, by his stammer. As one of his friends 
said, he stammered just enough to make you listen 
eagerly for the word. His good-natured critical 
thrusts were often barbed with a pun. "Here's 
Wordsworth," he stammered, after the poet had been 
offering some rather lofty criticism on Shakespeare, 
"he says he could have written H-Hamlet himself, 

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if he only had the m-mind !" And then he had a 
thousand quips and cranks of freakish fancy that 
altogether defy classification. Of course it was in 
his talk that these whimsicalities showed best, the 
suggestions of the moment accompanied by the 
twinkle of his eye and the droll tones of his speech. 
Such bubbles burst as soon as blown; they cannot 
be repeated. Many of Lamb's good things have, 
indeed, been told over and over again, and deserve 
to be; yet all who knew him declared that, as we 
may well believe, no report can give any adequate 
notion of that talk, — talk like snap-dragon, as Haz- 
litt said, sparkling with quaint or witty sayings, bits 
of waggish impudence, happy epithet and allusion, 
passing abruptly to some large or serious theme, 
brightened by a constant play of imagination, and shot 
through with sudden soft lights of tender feeling. It 
is, I suspect, only in his letters that we get some idea 
of the charm of his familiar talk. All the letters to 
Manning, for example, are delectable. 

But if the letters give the best picture of Lamb's 
wit and vivacity, it is in the Elia Essays that we 
see the inmost part of him. There are fifty of these 
essays. Of this number two are half-humorous 
fantasies not quite in his best manner, The New 
Yeafs Coming of Age and The Child Angel; seven 
are critical ; eight are papers of humorous observa- 
tion and comment, like The Decay of Beggars or 
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CHARLES LAMB 

A Quakers' Meeting; the remaining thirty-four are 
pure autobiography, concerned entirely with the 
records of Lamb's own habits, or friendships, or 
memories. They are all in the first person, and most 
of them look backward and linger in half-pathetic 
mood over the charm of things gone by. But in all 
of them, even in the critical papers, there is a tone of 
ingenuous confession, a confidence in the sympathy 
of the reader. There is no ostentation or posing in 
this, no pride in his interesting self, not a trace of the 
Byronic temper. Lamb makes a friend of you and 
tells you what he himself most cares for. Only an 
honest and kindly nature could venture to unbosom 
itself so frankly. And even an honest and kindly 
nature, by presuming too far upon your interest, 
may easily become a bore ; but, though some earnest 
folk have been known to pronounce Lamb trifling or 
perverse, it is inconceivable that he should ever be a 
bore. 

Nor is Lamb's humor, at least in the Elia Essays, 
ever idle. His keen enjoyment of the oddities and 
conceits of life is always tinged with some moral 
feeling. He delights to quiz our complacent judg- 
ments, to look beneath our smug conventions. He is 
always getting behind some sentimentality, or prig- 
gishness, or pedantry, where he can poke delicious 
fun at it. If he ever grows severe, it is in scorn for 
those elegant proprieties that too often mask essential 

io 5 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

coldness of heart. "I shall believe," he says, "in 
the professions of modern gallantry when in polite 
circles I see the same attention paid to age as to youth, 
to homely features as to handsome, to coarse com- 
plexions as to clear — to the woman as she is a 
woman; when Dorimant hands a fish-wife across 
the kennel or assists the apple woman to pick up 
her dissipated fruit. ,, On the other hand, he had 
a liking for all such innocent improprieties, weak- 
nesses, absurdities, as put our human nature at a 
disadvantage in the eyes of the well-conducted ma- 
jority. Odd people, unlucky people, tactless people, 
people in some way left out or left over, though they 
move his laughter, always appeal to his sympathy. 
It was not merely in childhood, as he avers, but all 
through his life, that he had " more yearnings toward 
that simple architect who built his house upon the 
sand than for his more cautious neighbor, and prized 
the simplicity of the five thoughtless virgins beyond 
the more provident but somewhat unfeminine wari- 
ness of their competitors." He might almost have 
said with Touchstone in the play, " It is a poor humor 
of mine to take that no one else will." In fact, I 
have sometimes thought that if you seek the closest 
parallel to the unique character of Lamb, you will 
find it, not in any veritable man of letters or history, 
but in this one of Shakespeare's creations for whom 
we have no better name than "fool," but who is in 
1 06 



CHARLES LAMB 

truth one of his wisest and most unselfish men. There 
is in both the same curious observation, the same 
whimsical liking to turn commonplace wrong side 
out, the same quaint fancy, half humorous and half 
pathetic, the same fidelity to friends and deep ten- 
derness of heart. 

Now it is in the Elia Essays that this subtly 
humorous temperament finds fullest expression. 
Nobody, so far as I know, has succeeded very well 
in giving a definition of humor. I certainly shall not 
attempt one. But it is one obvious characteristic 
of humor that it can find a peculiar pleasure in 
the manifold contrasts of life that most of us over- 
look. When the lofty and the humble are brought 
into sudden juxtaposition so as to emphasize 
the lofty, then we have the sense of the sublime; 
when the contrast emphasizes the humble, then 
we have the ludicrous, sometimes with a tone 
of irreverence or vulgarity. When suffering or en- 
durance is brought into contrast with the common- 
place so as to emphasize the suffering, then w r e have 
the sense of the heroic or the pathetic; when the 
commonplace is emphasized, we have the ludicrous, 
often of a cynical or unfeeling quality. But there 
is a humor which gives us the pleasure of unexpected 
contrast without degrading in the least the nobler 
element in the comparison, but rather intensifying 
it. When Emerson bids us hitch our wagon to a 

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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

star, is the saying humorous or sublime? When 
Lamb writes to Wordsworth, " God tempers the wind 
to the shorn Lambs," is that humorous or pathetic? 
In truth it is both; for humor of that sort is fused 
with our noblest and deepest feelings. And this is 
the humor of which the Elia Essays are full; in 
every sense a good humor — always reverent, al- 
ways gentle, humane. As we read these essays, we 
feel how oddly patched a stuff is this human life, to 
be sure ; but its beauties and its virtues seem all the 
brighter for the humorous contrast in which they are 
set, while our follies and vanities provoke a kindly 
laughter because they are thrown up against a back- 
ground of noble, and serious, and beautiful things. 
Obviously, then, such a humor should imply a 
quick sensibility for whatsoever things are noble, 
and serious, and beautiful. And it does. You 
can hardly read a page in these essays without rind- 
ing proof of that. Now it is a momentary glimpse 
of some quiet landscape, usually seen through the 
mellowing light of memory, as the Temple gardens, 
or the grounds of the old Blakesware mansion, " the 
furry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrell and day- 
long murmuring wood pigeon, with that antique 
image in the centre, god or goddess I knew not." 
More often, if it be description, it is of some object 
consecrated by long association with the joys and 
sorrows of men and calling to our thought some great 
1 08 



CHARLES LAMB 

complex of experience. For Lamb, though he loved 
nature well, loved men better. Unlike his friend 
Wordsworth, who hardly seemed to care for men un- 
less they had somehow passed under the solemniz- 
ing influence of mountain and sky, Lamb cared little 
for nature unless it were somehow humanized — 
unless, if I may say so, it had been lived in. But 
he did feel most keenly the charm of all those places 
or objects about which, for generations, had ebbed 
and flowed the tides of human life. This was the 
secret of his love for the town. There any ancient 
building that thrust its grimy venerableness upon the 
crowded street might suggest that Elian contrast, 
half humorous, half sad, between the laughter and 
loving, the scandal and striving of our little day, and 
the solemn memory of all the yesterdays. Take, for 
example, this passage on the sun-dials in the Temple 
gardens : — 

" What an antique air had the now almost effaced 
sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming co- 
evals with that Time which they measured, and to 
take their revelations of its flight immediately from 
heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain 
of light ! How would the dark line steal impercep- 
tibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to 
detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanes- 
cent cloud or the first arrests of sleep ! 

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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

" ' Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial hand 

Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived ! ' 

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous 
embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn 
dulness of communication, compared with the simple 
altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the 
old dials ! It stood as the garden god of Christian 
gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? 
If its business use be superseded by more elaborate 
inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have 
pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate 
labors, of pleasures not protracted after sunset, of 
temperance, and good hours. It was the primitive 
clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam could 
hardly have missed it in Paradise. It was the meas- 
ure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring 
by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings 
by, for flocks to be led to fold by. The shepherd 
'carved it out quaintly in the sun,' and, turning 
philosopher by the very occupation, provided it with 
mottoes more touching than tombstones." 

What placid grace of rhythm, what quaint felicity 
of epithet ! And what constant play of imagination, 
suggesting comparisons so unexpected and yet so 
apt — the movement of the shadow, "nice as an 
evanescent cloud or the first arrests of sleep !" And 
how the thought is gently beguiled by hints of sun- 
shine and sweet pastoral toil, to that first garden of 
no 



CHARLES LAMB 

all, when the moving shadow began to mark the his- 
tory of man, and the sun-dial was the " horologe of 
the first world." And all this poetry is heightened 
by humorous contrast with the modern clock, " with 
its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, and 
its pert or solemn dulness of communication. " 

Every one has noticed how rich is Lamb's writing 
in allusion. His memory was stored with the best 
things in literature and tradition, — imagery, senti- 
ment, and action, — in the choicest phrase of the mas- 
ters. All this treasure was at the service of his 
humor, to illustrate the odd contrast between the 
threadbare poverty of real life and the boundless 
wealth of imagination. For in Lamb's allusions 
the homely commonplace is usually confronted with 
some fancy, fair or bold ; the hard reality with some 
ideal beauty. The steward who bustles about on 
the old Margate hoy is like Ariel, " flaming at once 
about all parts of the deck" ; the burly cripple with- 
out legs who wheels himself about the streets in a 
go-cart is "a grand fragment, as good as an Elgin 
marble"; when the sooty-faced chimney-sweep's 
grin discloses his double row of white teeth, Lamb 

quotes : — 

"a sable cloud 
Turns forth her silver lining on the night." 

But Lamb's richness of allusion is not best exempli- 
fied by images like these, detached from their setting. 

in 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

It is seen rather in quick turns of humorous phrase, 
in a single word of quotation, in sudden glimpses and 
reflections of his reading, so fleeting that we can hardly 
identify them, yet casting a constant glimmer of 
humor over the homely facts out of which the essay 
is woven. In all such allusions the effect is not to 
degrade the loftier element in the comparison, but 
to beautify the lower. This is the humor, not of the 
cynic, but of the poet. It discloses sudden, unfore- 
seen relations between the highest and the humblest 
things; it makes us feel "how near is grandeur to 
our dust." 

Lamb's literary style is unique. If style be meas- 
ured by the faithfulness with which it reveals the per- 
sonality of the writer, then Lamb's must be nearly 
perfect. To attempt any imitation of it would be 
to fall into intolerable preciosity. In force and com- 
pass, of course, he is not to be ranked with the great- 
est men; but nobody's work is more exquisite. To 
use a phrase more commonly applied to painters, 
I should call Lamb one of the Little Masters. His 
diction is a study in verbal values. He had a nice 
sense of the significance of words, the aroma of asso- 
ciation. He loved to elaborate a statement slowly, 
lingering over its details and tasting the flavor of 
every phrase with deliberate relish. But the charm 
of his style is due most of all to the constant presence 
of his imagination. His thought is always concret- 
112 



CHARLES LAMB 

ing itself in illustration or example, and in almost 
every line blossoms into some rare or graceful fancy. 
It is so spontaneous that the reader hardly appreciates 
its richness ; but in reality — if the homely phrase 
may be pardoned — there is more imagination to the 
square inch in Lamb's writing than in almost any 
other modern prose. 

The archaic cast of his style is due, of course, to the 
influence of his favorite seventeenth-century men, 
especially Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne. Not that 
he slavishly copied these men, or even consciously 
imitated them; but he had steeped himself in their 
writing till their manner became second nature. 
In the preface to the Last Essays of Elia, he says, 
" The essays of the late Elia were villainously pranked 
in an affected array of antique words and phrases, 
but they had not been his if they had been other than 
such ; and better it is that a writer should be natural 
in a self-pleasing quaintness than to affect a natural- 
ness (so-called) that should be strange to him." 

In fact, this "self-pleasing quaintness" never does 
seem affected. Sometimes it gives to a passage an 
old-fashioned daintiness of manner, as of something 
laid in lavender: — 

" What a place to be in is an old library ! It seems 
as though all the souls of all the writers that have 
bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians, were 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. 
I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their 
winding sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. 
I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage ; 
and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is 
fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples 
which grew amid the happy orchard." 

But more often this seventeenth-century manner 
serves to emphasize that contrast between the stately 
and the familiar upon which, as we have said, so 
much of Lamb's humor depends. As a rule, no form 
of pleasantry is more inane than the attempt to apply 
big words to small things. But Lamb's writing sel- 
dom degenerates into this form of feeble burlesque. 
His large utterance seems not only natural to him, but 
in some way fitting to his theme. There are passages 
in the essays that, so far as style is concerned, might 
have been taken bodily out of Sir Thomas Browne's 
Religio Medici or Urn Burial; yet their antique 
dignity of manner seems not misapplied. Take, for 
example, some sentences from A Quakers' Meeting : — 

"Dost thou love silence deep as that 'before the 
winds were made ' ? go not out into the wilderness, 
descend not into the profundities of the earth ; shut 
not up thy casements; nor pour wax into the little 
cells of thy ears, with little-faith'd, self-mistrusting 
Ulysses. — Retire with me into a Quakers' Meeting. 
114 



CHARLES LAMB 

"For a man to refrain even from good words, and 
to hold his peace, it is commendable; but for a 
multitude, it is a great mastery. 

" What is the stillness of the desert compared with 
this place? what the uncommunicating muteness of 
fishes ? — here the goddess reigns and revels. — 
1 Boreas, and Cesias and Argestes loud,' do not with 
their interconfounding uproars more augment the 
brawl — nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their 
clubbed sounds — than their opposite (Silence her 
sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense 
by numbers and by sympathy. She too hath her 
deeps that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a 
positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem 
to obscure the great obscurity of midnight. 

"To pace alone in the cloisters or side aisles of 
some cathedral, time stricken ; 

" 'Or under hanging mountains, 
Or by the fall of fountains;' 

is but a vulgar luxury compared with that which those 
enjoy who come together for the purposes of more 
complete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneli- 
ness 'to be felt.' — The Abbey Church of West- 
minster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, 
as the naked walls and benches of a Quakers' Meet- 
ing. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions, 

"'. . . Sands, ignoble things, 
Dropt from the ruined sides of kings' — 

ii5 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

but here is something which throws Antiquity her- 
self into the foreground — Silence — eldest of 
things — language of old Night — primitive dis- 
courser — to which the insolent decays of moulder- 
ing grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as 
we may say, unnatural progression." 

In such a passage as this there is far more than the 
half-humorous adaptation of a stately and antiquated 
manner. This writing, though so rich with rhetoric 
that, like some gorgeous stuffs, it will almost stand 
alone, is cumbered with no idle verbiage. Every 
epithet is a flash of imagination. That conceit of 
silence as intensified by numbers is worthy of the 
subtle Dr. John Donne; and some of the phrases 
are fairly startling in their vivid boldness. "The 
insolent decays of mouldering grandeur " — I wonder 
how many prose-writers of the last two centuries 
could have hit upon that ! To pile together super- 
annuated diction in involved structure is easy enough ; 
but to write a passage like that, in the ampler manner 
of our elder masters, and yet natural and unstrained, 
of imagination all compact, informed with grave and 
quiet feeling and yet played about with lambent lights 
of humor — this is not easy. Who else besides Lamb 
in the last century and a half has been able to do any- 
thing like it? But then, who has been able to do 
anything that Lamb did? 
116 



CHARLES LAMB 

For one comes back to the statement that the charm 
of Lamb's work and character is unique. It eludes 
analysis. And the better one knows him, the more 
impossible does it seem to put into words any ade- 
quate likeness of the man. His humor, his tender- 
ness, his imagination, his sense of beauty, and his 
sense of oddity, — they were all peculiar in quality 
and more subtly combined than in ordinary men. 

Only once or twice — perhaps only once, in that 
most intimate of all his essays, the Dream Children 
— does Lamb drop all affectations and tell us the 
things that lay nearest his heart in language too 
utterly sincere even for the disguise of his u self- 
pleasing quaintness." In that perfect essay humor 
is quite lost in pathos ; and the English in which the 
simple story is told, for purity of idiom, chaste sim- 
plicity, and artless grace of movement, is quite un- 
surpassed. No one else in Lamb's day wrote such 
English, and to find anything so perfect you will 
have to go back to the best passages of the English 
Bible. Here Lamb has set up a glass where we may 
see the inmost part of him. 



117 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

I 

One October afternoon in 1807 a post-chaise was 
crawling slowly up the long hill that separates the 
vale of Rydal from the vale of Grasmere in the Eng- 
lish Lake District. In the post-chaise sat a lady and 
her little daughter. Her two boys, of seven and 
nine, impatient of the slow ascent had alighted, gone 
on over the brow of the hill, and were briskly running 
down the other side toward the Grasmere Valley. 
Behind them followed as fast as he might a short, 
frail, little man, who looked himself at first glance 
to be a boy, but whose face, already beginning to be 
seamed with thought, showed him to be past his first 
youth. The three had reached the foot of the hill, 
when a sharp turn in the road suddenly disclosed to 
their view a little white cottage, roses and jasmine 
clambering about its windows, and two dark yew 
trees throwing a protecting shadow over its wall. 
At sight of this cottage the young man stopped in- 
stantly, hesitated, as if about to turn back; but as 
the boys ran in at the cottage gate, he, too, as if by a 
118 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

sudden impulse of desire that overcame his shyness, 
pushed in after them. Just at that moment the post- 
chaise pulled up at the gate, and a tall, grave-look- 
ing man with two ladies hurried out from the cottage 
door to meet it. Our shy but eager young man, 
who is evidently a stranger to these cottage folk, 
and for the moment hardly noticed by them, in their 
haste to greet the lady of the post-chaise, steps mod- 
estly into the tiny porch of the cottage and awaits 
his welcome as the whole party comes in. 

This young man, of course, is Thomas De Quincey, 
travelling to Keswick as an escort for Mrs. Coleridge 
and her children ; he is meeting for the first time, and 
with trembling reverence, the great Mr. William 
Wordsworth. A year before he had come up to 
the Lake District with intent to call upon the poet, 
and had got a glimpse of the white cottage from the 
slope of Hammerscar across the lake ; but had turned 
back, afraid to enter the presence of the god of his 
idolatry. But now he is in the cottage with him, 
taking tea by his humble fireside, not as with one to 
be feared, but — to use his own phrase — as with 
Raphael the affable angel, on the terms of man with 
man. 

This meeting with Wordsworth was a turning- 
point in the career of Thomas De Quincey. He 
himself averred that it was marked by a change even 
in the physical condition of his nervous system. The 

119 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

restless desire, the morbid self -consciousness and self- 
distrust, the disheartening sense of distance between 
him and his ideals, — all this vanished in an hour 
before the homely hospitality of William Wordsworth. 
It was reassuring to find that the greatest man of 
the time — for such he thought Wordsworth — was 
the simplest, content in his retirement among the 
hills, and careless of the loud noises of fame. But 
whatever influence this meeting may have had upon 
the mental development of De Quincey, it certainly 
may be considered as the beginning of a new period 
in the outward history of his life. Up to this time 
he has been a sort of vagrant, without fixed place of 
residence, without any definite purpose, without any 
congenial friends. Coleridge he had met a few weeks 
before this visit to Grasmere; now he has met 
Wordsworth ; three days later he is to meet Southey ; 
a few months later he will meet John Wilson. These 
men, in spite of differences and temporary estrange- 
ments inevitable with such a temperament as his, 
remained his best, almost his only, friends for more 
than half his lifetime. The next summer he visited 
Wordsworth again; and when, in 1809, Wordsworth 
left this little cottage, he took it, and called it his home 
for more than twenty years. Hither, after some six 
years of bachelor life, he brought a wife from a farm- 
house at Rydal Water a mile away ; here his children 
were born. It is hardly too much to say that the 
120 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

direction of all his later life was determined by this 
visit to Wordsworth. 

It is not easy, however, to trace with accuracy his 
doings or his whereabouts, either before or after that 
event. Some early passages in his life he himself 
described with great detail in those sketches after- 
wards pieced together for the Autobiography. But 
the Autobiography is no connected narrative. It is 
rather a series of pictures of some moments in which 
the life of long periods seemed focussed, incidents 
in which his personality was revealed to himself, or 
the sadness and wonder of the world struck in upon 
his soul. The incidents, moreover, are related as they 
stood in his memory years after they occurred, when 
his morbidly heightened fancy had doubtless envel- 
oped them with circumstance unnoticed at the time 
or altogether imaginary. When all his life had passed 
into the atmosphere of dream, he never could quite 
tell how much of it was fact and how much was only 
dream. 

The one significant fact that seems clear from these 
records is that De Quincey and all his brothers and 
sisters were precocious young folk, with a certain 
wayward intensity of imagination. Two of his 
sisters died in early childhood, both from some 
affection of the brain. His eldest brother, who died 
in young manhood, was a singularly brilliant boy, 
who lived for years most of the time in a realm of 

121 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

romance of his own creation, and had strength of will 
enough to make his brothers live there, too. The 
younger brother, Pink, ran away to sea in his teens, 
was captured by pirates, recaptured, served in the 
navy, and in a dozen years passed through a series 
of adventures wild enough for a Stevenson romance. 
Whence they got this strain in their blood it might 
be hard to say ; for their father was a well-to-do mer- 
chant of Manchester, prosaic enough, for all that 
appears, both in character and pursuits. Thomas 
De Quincey at thirteen years of age, — if we may 
take his word for it, — could read Greek with ease, 
and at fifteen not only wrote lyric Greek verse, but 
conversed in Greek fluently, and was in the habit of 
reading off the daily newspaper into that language — 
a process that must have racked the Greek consider- 
ably. "That boy," said one of his masters, " could 
harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I 
could address an English one." His father had died 
when De Quincey was only seven years of age, and 
the boy was kept in school by his guardians, under 
an uncongenial master, after he should have been at 
the University. He ran away, and as he flatly re- 
fused to go back, his mother gave him a guinea a 
week and let him wander wherever he would. He 
drifted about for some months in Wales, living in 
farmhouses, and astonishing the good folk by his 
courtesy and his erudition ; and towards winter made 

122 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

his way up to London. His adventures here : how 
he slept starving and shivering in a Greek Street 
garret, how he roamed the city with Anne of Oxford 
Street and fainted of cold and hunger in Soho Square, 
how he was helped by the good Jews at the rate of 
eighteen per cent, and at last by some fortunate 
accident — he never told what — he was discovered, 
restored to his friends, and sent up to Oxford where 
he belonged, — all this will be remembered by every- 
body, for everybody has read the Confessions. Yet 
the story raises some doubts. Without question it is 
true in outline ; but I think it must be embroidered a 
little. This romantic tramping in Wales with his 
mother's consent and a guinea a week; all this 
vagabondage and starvation in London when there 
was bread enough and to spare in his mother's house, 
— it seems too much to believe of a rational mother 
or a rational son. I suspect the laudanum has got 
into the story. 

He entered Worcester College, Oxford, in 1803, 
and he was there through 1808; but he couldn't 
have kept his terms regularly in the latter year, and 
seems not to have been in residence much after the 
summer of 1807. He formed no intimacies in 
college, lived much by himself, and as, from some 
freak or other, he refused to stand his final examina- 
tions, he never took a degree. But he seems to have 
read a good deal in literature and philosophy; and 

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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

he was one of the few young men who hailed with 
genuine appreciation the early work of Coleridge 
and Wordsworth. 

In 1809 he took up his residence in the Lake 
District, occupying the little Grasmere cottage that 
Wordsworth was then vacating; but what he was 
doing there for the next twelve years nobody knows. 
He had adopted no profession. He wrote no books 
or reviews, and seemed to have no clear vocation 
to literature. No one knew or saw much of him. 
He says himself that he was reading German meta- 
physics and taking opium. Both habits he had 
acquired while in the University; both accorded 
well with his dreamy, isolated temper ; both he kept 
up during life. In 18 19, urged by the needs of an 
increasing family, he became editor of a local news- 
paper in Kendal; German metaphysics and Tory 
politics, however, made a mixture not relished by his 
rural readers, and after some months he gave up 
that project. But two years later, in 182 1, appeared 
in the London Magazine the Confessions of an 
Opium-Eater, and De Quincey's literary career was 
begun. For the next four years he was much in 
London, preparing for the London Magazine a series 
of some dozen papers continuing and supplementing 
the Confessions. By 1826 he got the ear of the pub- 
lic and was a coveted contributor. 

After about this time, however, his interests drew 
124 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

him away from London to Edinburgh. For more 
than ten years his closest friend among his neighbors 
in the Lake District had been, not Wordsworth, 
for whom his early reverence had now somewhat 
abated, but John Wilson of Elleray. Wilson 
was now at the height of his popularity as editor of 
Blackwood's Magazine, and had already once or 
twice ventured to introduce the Opium-Eater as a 
character into his famous Nodes Ambrosianae. He 
now persuaded his friend to lend his pen to the ser- 
vice of Blackwood, and after 1826 De Quincey became 
a frequent contributor to that brilliant periodical. 
In 1834 Taifs Magazine was set up in Edinburgh; 
it was for these two journals, Blackwood and Tail, 
that most of De Quincey's work was done for the 
rest of his life. In 1830 he removed his family to 
lodgings in Edinburgh; and in 1837, after the death 
of his wife, took a cottage at Lasswade, a little way 
out of the city, which was his home — or at all 
events the home of his children — so long as he 
lived. For himself he preferred to do his writing 
in hired rooms in town, near his publishers; and it 
is part of the De Quincey legend that he used to occupy 
a room until it was entirely " snowed up" with papers 
and manuscripts which he despaired of arranging 
and yet would not destroy, when he would back out 
and hire another room, only to be pushed out of 
this again by the ever accumulating mass of papers. 

"5 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

What seems certain is that he must have produced 
a vastly greater amount of manuscript than he ever 
got printed; had he published all he wrote, the 
array of his works might have been something appall- 
ing. In his later days he was one of the celebrities 
of Edinburgh; but it was difficult to get sight of 
him ; for he refused most of the conventions of society 
and usually had to be found, if found at all, buried 
in some of his bookish retreats. He kept on writing 
to the end ; but the last years of his life were mostly 
spent in garnering up his scattered papers from the 
magazines, revising and arranging them for a col- 
lected edition of his works. In spite of the ill-health 
by which he had always been harassed, in spite of 
his life-long opium habit, — or possibly because of 
it, — the fragile little man outlived all his early 
friends, and died in 1859, at the good old age of 
seventy-four. 

II 

After all no one seems to know much of De Quincey; 
no one ever did know much of him. When you 
have read all his own Confessions, you feel he has 
told you little of himself, of his pursuits, his practical 
outward life, still less of his affections, his inner 
life. A very considerable body of reminiscence 
from his contemporaries has, indeed, gathered about 
his memory, and some thirty years ago Mr. Japp — 

126 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

or, as for some unknown reason he preferred to call 
himself, Mr. Page — wrote his life in two stout 
volumes; yet all the letters and the stories leave 
us with the feeling that we have not really got inside 
that strange personality. The truth is there seems 
something demonic, almost spectral, about De 
Quincey. He wasn't one of your men of large red 
health, who stand solidly on the ground, and love 
the broad plain facts of life. He lived in the Gras- 
mere cottage twenty years; but he formed few 
acquaintances and left few memories there. Of all 
his Grasmere neighbors, Dorothy Wordsworth, 
who had that gift for appreciating genius which 
is itself a form of genius, always understood him 
best, and her sympathy and judgment several times 
stood him in good stead. People of plain com- 
mon sense naturally found him difficult. Harriet 
Martineau, — a very large incarnation of common 
sense, — who lived near him for years, declared that 
his absorption and selfish moodiness had rendered 
him quite insensible to the ordinary requisites of 
honor and courtesy, to say nothing of gratitude 
and sincerity. But Harriet Martineau was herself 
rather difficult. In those years of the Grasmere resi- 
dence he was generally invisible; for he preferred 
to read and dream indoors by day, and come forth 
to walk by night. Many a night, past midnight, 
when all the valley was hushed in slumber and 

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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

lights had ceased to twinkle in the cottages, his 
little form might have been made out, flitting like 
some darker shadow up the hillside, over the 
fells, or resting in some secluded nook by the 
Rothay. 

Neither in his own house or anywhere else did 
the ordinary conventions of society ever get much 
hold on him. At the call of some chance thought, 
his daughter says, he might interrupt the process 
of dressing himself in the morning, and forget alto- 
gether to resume it, perhaps receiving a visitor later 
in the day without his coat or wearing half the 
proper number of stockings. Going to call on 
Professor Wilson in Gloucester Place, Edinburgh, 
one stormy evening, he decided to remain over 
night, and literally stayed a year. During all 
this visit, Wilson says, he lived in a kind of mysterious 
seclusion, spending most of his days locked in his 
room, stretched on the floor before the fire, and 
was only seen when toward midnight he stole out of 
doors for a long walk. If he could be captured at a 
late dinner lasting till two or three in the morning, 
he would sometimes pour forth a stream of talk that 
entranced all his hearers. As a rule, however, 
he refused to take his meals with others; and 
Wilson's servants used to place food outside the 
door of his room, leaving him to take it when he 
liked, and often finding it twelve hours later un- 
128 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

touched. Later on, in 1843, Wilson declared that, 
though he supposed himself to be the most intimate 
friend of De Quincey, and the De Quincey family, 
then living at Lasswade, frequently sent to him for 
news of their father, yet he had seen him not above 
four times in six years. Even his own family, it is 
clear, always deemed him an odd creature. 

This peculiar abstracted temper was aggravated, 
doubtless, by the opium habit; but it was not en- 
gendered by opium. De Quincey was born with 
eyes that open inwards. He lived in a world of 
his own — a world of dream and speculation. Not 
that he was altogether without interest in outward 
affairs, social, economic, or political; but he was 
unable to take the obvious and practical view of 
them. With an almost preternatural gift to discover 
subtlety or paradox, he was as helpless as a child 
before the simplest business difficulty. He wan- 
dered half over Edinburgh one evening trying to 
negotiate a personal loan for seven shillings sixpence, 
and offering as security a fifty-pound bank-note; 
at the same time he was writing a treatise on the 
Logic of the Laws of Wealth. In this isolation and 
self-absorption there was nothing of cynicism or 
misanthropy. On the contrary, there often seemed 
to be in his manner a kind of timid appeal for 
human sympathy and companionship. He left 
upon you the impression of a man "moving about 
k 129 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

in worlds not realized." He had a soft and dep- 
recating tone in his voice and a gentle but elaborate 
courtesy which he extended to everybody alike. 
Professor Wilson's daughter says that when he was 
staying in their house, he would inform the cook with 
a stately deference, as if he had taken her for a 
duchess, that "owing to dyspepsia affecting my 
system, and the possibility of any additional derange- 
ment of the stomach taking place, consequences 
incalculably distressing would arise, so much so 
indeed as to increase nervous irritation, and pre- 
vent me from attending to matters of overwhelm- 
ing importance, if you do not remember to cut 
the mutton in a diagonal rather than in a longitu- 
dinal form." 

But with a friend, or even with a comparative 
stranger whom he had reason to think thoroughly 
sympathetic, De Quincey could come out of his with- 
drawn and silent mood, and be a most delightful 
companion. No subject could be started in conver- 
sation that would not soon touch some topic in 
which he felt an interest ; then a flush would spread 
itself over the withered little face, the eyelids would 
lift, slowly and as with an effort, disclosing a pair of 
wonderful, immortal eyes, the feeble mouth would 
tremble and twitch for an instant, and then his talk 
would begin. Low-voiced, deliberate, as if far away, 
eddying hither and thither, circling about all sorts 
130 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

of topics yet never quite losing its way, monotonous 
in tone always, but in matter varied, brilliant, elo- 
quent, full of ingenious reflection, curious fact, 
striking paradox, flavored with bits of caustic satire 
or gossip, shot through with strange lights of fancy. 
"What wouldn't one give," said Mrs. Carlyle, when 
first she saw him in an evening company, "what 
wouldn't one give to have that little man in a box 
and take him out now and then to talk?" Every- 
body that ever met him intimately, — Tom Hood, 
Professor Wilson, Harriet Martineau, Hill Burton, 
Professor Masson, Mr. Fields, Mr. Gillies, and half 
a score of other people, — they all testify to that 
marvellous stream of talk. But, curious to say, so 
far as I can discover, not one of them ever remem- 
bered a dozen words of what he said. They descant 
upon the fluency, the music, the subtlety, the learn- 
ing of his talk; but what, on any given occasion, 
Mr. De Quincey was actually talking about, nobody 
seems to have recorded. In truth it probably didn't 
much matter. Evidently it was the extraordinary 
brilliancy of the exercise that fascinated his hearers, 
rather than any definite body of opinion. It wasn't 
talk like Johnson's, made up of stout, well-shaped 
propositions to be defended against all disputants, 
but rather a winding stream of speculation and rhet- 
oric, sweeping its long curves through the borders 
of a dim land of dreams. 

I3 1 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

III 

Now all of De Quincey's literary work is just this 
talk put into print. He wrote easily — too easily ; 
it was his mode of talking to himself, and those 
mounds of manuscript that filled, one after another, 
the dens in Edinburgh where he spent his days were 
only other masses of talk that did not get into print. 
As you open his book you hear the man going on 
with his monologue. There on the printed page is the 
curious combination of volubility and precision, the 
garrulity, the discursiveness, the love of paradox, 
the indifference to the obvious and the vision for 
the remote, the labored humor, — all those qualities 
that, they tell us, used to mark his conversation. 
Of him it may be said in a very special sense that 
he being dead yet speaketh. And herein is the best 
assurance for the permanence of his work. Any writ- 
ing that can preserve for us in such vivid complete- 
ness the personality of a man is sure to live ; certainly 
if that personality be so interesting as De Quincey's. 

On the other hand, writing like this has some very 
obvious and very serious defects; so serious as to 
make it doubtful whether most of De Quincey's 
work can ever rank very high as literature. The truth 
is that talk, however wonderful, is not exactly lit- 
erature; it needs first to be composed. But De 
Quincey never really composed anything. There is 
132 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

no method in his work, no clear foresight of the end 
from the beginning, nothing final and finished. With 
all his learning and subtlety he never wrote anything 
to be properly called a treatise, though he planned 
several. His essays, critical or historical, are full 
of curious fact and conjecture, personal speculation 
and personal reminiscence, ranging from Dan to 
Beersheba, but they are seldom or never the clear, 
well-arranged presentation of the subjects they pro- 
fess to discuss. He gives a variety of incidental 
suggestion, frequent illuminating glimpses of the 
recondite relations of his theme; but he fails in the 
humbler, though more important, task of giving 
to his subject ordered and unified treatment. In 
fact, he never was a direct or systematic thinker. 
His mental habits were so discursive that, although 
he had great penetration, he was nevertheless always 
something of the dilettante. The most miscellaneous 
of writers, in his last days he was sorely put to it 
to make any intelligible plan of arrangement for 
his collected work ; and his latest editor has broken 
up that plan without being able to devise any much 
better. A sort of Admirable Crichton, he did nothing 
with his knowledge, he reached no conclusions, he 
settled no questions, marked out no new paths for 
human thought; and the large familiar elements of 
life out of which great literature is made, man's love 
and hope and desire, — still less to these could he 

*33 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

give such expression as shall thrill or inspire. He 
could only gossip; curious, usually interesting, 
sometimes instructive, it was still gossip — gossip 
through fourteen stricken volumes. 

But this is not the worst. Gossip is often delight- 
ful. But this talk, page after page, in the cold print, 
without the fascinating voice and presence of the 
Opium-Eater himself, if I mistake not, will often try 
the patience of the reader. We find ourselves re- 
membering that life is short. De Quincey is excel- 
lent reading, if you have leisure; but of leisure he 
demands a great deal. Professor Masson suggests 
that a young man could do no better than to take three 
months and read through the whole body of De 
Quincey' s writing. Such a course would doubtless 
sharpen his intellect and broaden greatly the range 
of his knowledge; but I suspect the young man 
would have some heavy half-hours. Yet another 
critic, Mr. Saintsbury, remarks it is probably in 
youth that the merits of De Quincey are best appre- 
ciated ; he ought to be read, thinks Mr. Saintsbury, 
when you are about fifteen or sixteen. Much of 
De Quincey would probably tax the brains of a lad 
of sixteen ; yet Mr. Saintsbury may be right in deem- 
ing that age most tolerant of De Quincey's manner. 
For at sixteen there seems time enough for anything ; 
art is short and life is long; before we are fifty we 
learn better. 

i34 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

We admit to those who admire his style that De 
Quincey is never verbose ; he never repeats the same 
thought with needless fulness of phrase. But he is 
the most prolix of mortals. Tennyson says of the 
flower in the crannied wall — 

"I pluck you out of the crannies, 
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower — but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is." 

It is this kind of knowledge of every fact and every 
truth that De Quincey seems bent on imparting. In 
a very suggestive passage of the Reminiscences he 
says that in early youth he labored under a peculiar 
embarrassment whenever he sought to convey his 
thought in language: "It was not words only I 
wanted; but I could not unravel, I could not even 
make perfectly conscious to myself, the subsidiary 
thoughts into which one leading thought often radi- 
ates; or, at least, I could not do this with anything 
like the rapidity requisite for conversation. I la- 
bored like a sibyl instinct with the burden of pro- 
phetic woe as often as I found myself dealing with 
any topic in which the understanding combined with 
deep feelings to suggest mixed and tangled thoughts ; 
and thus partly — partly also from my invincible 
habit of revery — I had a most distinguished talent 
'pour le silence. '" This states admirably the mode 

J 35 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

of thought he coveted when young, and attained in 
such perfection in his maturer years. With a mar- 
vellous richness of vocabulary and the utmost pre- 
cision of phrase, he was never content to isolate a 
truth from its connections, as it is needful to do if 
we would give a clear statement of it in moderate 
compass. He must pull his thought up by the roots, 
and then trace out with laborious precision all its 
minute filaments, and its ramifications into a network 
of other thought. Everything reminds him of some- 
thing else. Now if he had, and we had, the secular 
leisures of a Methuselah, this would be a most profit- 
able exercise; but the result in our little day is that 
he exhausts our patience and doesn't exhaust any- 
thing else. 

In the treatment of any subject De Quincey sel- 
dom begins at the beginning; he begins a good way 
back of the beginning. He has to work inward 
through a thicket of secondary suggestion that has 
grown up about his original thought, and his path 
is sure to be circuitous and broken by numerous side 
excursions. Take as an example his method of 
approach to the leading proposition of one section 
of his famous essay on Style — the proposition that 
Greek literature is concentrated in two periods about 
seventy-five years apart. That is a simple historical 
statement, and one would think it might be laid down 
and proved at once. How does De Quincey get at 
136 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

it? He begins with a reference to the late Latin 
poet, Velleius Paterculus, and proceeds to give a 
sketch of his life and times in three pages ; then comes 
the statement for which Paterculus was called in, 
to the effect that genius tends to "agglomerate"; 
the passage is given in the original, and translated 
clause by clause, with an embroidery of discussion 
on the style of Paterculus — three pages more ; then 
come examples from various literatures ancient and 
modern, proving the truth of the assertion of Pater- 
culus — four pages more ; then the reasons in the 
constitution of the human mind for this periodic 
manifestation of genius, and the consequent necessity 
of the alternation of creative and critical periods — 
four pages more; and then, at last, we come to our 
central proposition that there were two such periods 
in Greek literature. All this preliminary pother over 
Paterculus is quite needless; it does not prove or 
really introduce De Quincey's main thesis; it is all 
excrescence. 

Sometimes he is quite unable to get through this 
preliminary matter, and never reaches his central 
theme at all. Like Coleridge, he has the exasperat- 
ing trick of promising some elaborate discussion or 
exposition, bringing up horse, foot, and dragoons to 
make ready, and then abruptly retiring from the 
field. All readers of Coleridge's Biographia Lit- 
eraria will remember the lively anticipation with 

i37 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

which they — unless forewarned — expected his 
promised discussion of the Imagination or Eseni- 
plastic Faculty; and the inclination to profanity 
when they found Coleridge suddenly deciding, after 
all his parade of preparation, to postpone the dis- 
cussion to some more convenient season. De Quin- 
cey, in his Letters to a Young Man, does precisely 
the same thing with reference to the philosophy of 
Kant. He informs his correspondent that he will 
do what divers other philosophers have vainly 
essayed to do, give him a succinct statement of the 
fundamental positions of the Kantian philosophy. 
Ah, thinks the reader, now we have something definite 
and much to be desired. But, first, De Quincey must 
expose the ignorance and folly of previous exposi- 
tors — six of them ; then he must remind his corre- 
spondent that the difficulty of Kant arises principally 
from his terminology, and show that a new terminol- 
ogy is a necessity in a new philosophy. By that time 
he is at the end of his sheet, and forced to postpone 
the exposition of Kant to another letter — which he 
never wrote. 

And even when he does reach his theme, his treat- 
ment of it is often sadly lacking in proportion. Some 
of his critical essays, for example, are so largely taken 
up with subordinate or collateral matters as to give 
you little help in estimating the essential character or 
value of the work criticised. You have been amused 
138 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

with a great variety of minor considerations, but you 
come out at the end a little mazed, asking yourself 
what you have got, after all; and as far as the main 
object of your search is concerned, very much in the 
condition — if I may borrow one of De Quincey's 
own jokes — of the student to whom was propounded 
the old Cambridge problem, "Given the captain's 
name and the year of our Lord, to determine the 
longitude of the ship." 

Perhaps it is in his narrative writing that we find 
the most remarkable instances of this vagabond 
manner. It is true, indeed, that here it usually 
doesn't so much matter. When De Quincey is 
recounting his own experiences, his rambling garru- 
lity is rather pleasant. We know he will never get 
through; this is no story to be finished. When he 
has talked long enough he will stop; and we need 
listen no longer than we wish. I don't know that 
any special illumination is spread over De Quincey's 
life in the Manchester Grammar School by telling us 
that his mother had a friend who, when a pretty widow 
of thirty-six, had married an ugly German named 
Schreiber, who took snuff ; that Mrs. Schreiber, after- 
ward separated from Schreiber, took charge of two 
orphan girls from India, and placed them under a 
system of excellent discipline that it takes fifteen 
pages to describe; that one of these girls, with a 
Madonna-like face and almond-shaped eyes, married 

i39 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Lord Carberry, studied New Testament Greek with 
De Quincey, and discussed with him for ten pages the 
relation of the Christian religion to pagan morality; 
that Mrs. Schreiber, having a cancerous affection, 
called in the services of a distinguished surgeon, Dr. 
White, who administered hemlock with some bene- 
ficial effects; that Dr. White's two daughters were 
very fond of Lady Carberry — especially the younger; 
that Dr. White had a museum and in it a mummy and 
a skeleton; that the mummy was deposited in a tall 
clock case, the face covered with a piece of white 
velvet and not disclosed even to Lady Carberry; 
that some seventy years before, when there was still 
something of glamour about the life of the highway- 
man (for which plausible reasons may be adduced in 
three pages) there had been a notable robbery and 
murder committed in a brick house on the west side 
of the college green in the city of Bristol, near where 
Southey and Coleridge afterward lived, and forty- 
eight hours before the robbery, a very tall, handsome 
young man, respected by his neighbors, had ridden 
out of the village of Knutsford, and was by many 
suspected to have been the robber; and that the 
skeleton in the museum of Dr. White, who attended 
Mrs. Schreiber, who reared Lady Carberry, who 
talked Greek with De Quincey, may have been the 
skeleton of this robber. All this isn't exactly neces- 
sary to our conception of the life and studies of young 
140 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

De Quincey in the Manchester Grammar School, 
but it is amusing. To be sure, a life of De Quincey 
written on this plan would reach " from here to Meso- 
potamy, a thing the imagination boggles at" ; but De 
Quincey isn't writing his life, he is only talking. 

In argument or exposition, where we have a right 
to expect method and conclusion, this manner is less 
excusable. Yet here it is not due to revery or mere 
vagrancy of thought, but rather to De Quincey's 
irresistible tendency to chase every subject into all 
its relations. He himself justly claimed to be a 
vigorous and accurate thinker; but his mind was 
fascinated by the complexity of forces that enter into 
every event, the tangled skein of motives that issue 
in every volition. Minds of this habit cannot con- 
template one thing at a time, and so are ill-fitted for 
clear exposition ; they cannot decide promptly, and 
so are ill-fitted for efficient action. But they often 
greatly stimulate and broaden other minds. They 
disclose unsuspected truth, and show the profounder 
reason that underlies our conventional beliefs. Cole- 
ridge is an excellent case in point; in imaginative 
literature the familiar example is Hamlet. If De 
Quincey has left us nothing of high philosophic worth, 
this is not so much because his intellect was less 
acute than that of Coleridge or even because he had 
less power of concentration ; but rather because he 
could never bring himself to observe any just pro- 

141 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

portion or relative value among the subjects of his 
thought. He will often overlook all the obvious and 
important phases of his theme to trace out some re- 
mote or unfamiliar implication. He seems to care 
more for novelty than for truth, and is more inter- 
ested to surprise than to persuade. Nothing pleases 
him better than to fasten to some familiar proposition 
a long sorites, and then follow his sorites underground 
till the conclusion emerges at last in some quite 
unexpected quarter. He loves thus to disclose links 
of cause we had never thought of, or show the inade- 
quacy of some generally accepted notion. For ex- 
ample, the great literature of Greece, he says, owes 
many of its distinctive qualities to the fact that it 
never could be, in the modern sense of the word, 
published. But why was it not published? Why, 
of course, you say, because the art of printing had not 
then been invented. Oh, no, rejoins De Quincey, 
that is not the reason; that is a foolish reply; the 
art of printing had been invented and lost again half 
a dozen times before the fifteenth century — witness 
the beautiful inscriptions upon coins. It was not 
printing that was lacking, but paper. And why 
paper ? Because there were no cotton or linen rags. 
And why no rags? Because people almost univer- 
sally wore woollen clothing. And thus the fact that 
the Greeks wore woollen clothes determines the liter- 
ary style of their writing. 

142 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

The humor of De Quincey, when it is genuine and 
spontaneous, usually proceeds from this same liking 
to trace remote or unexpected affiliations of thought. 
Much of his humor, however, is neither genuine nor 
spontaneous. I must confess I cannot find much 
humor in the famous paper on Murder as a Fine Art. 
The phrase that forms the title is witty, and had it 
been used in conversation to point a satiric reference, 
might have been a brilliant bon mot; but to work 
the subject out, with laborious ingenuity into all its 
grewsome details, preserving the while the temper 
of the connoisseur, this is merely a forcible inversion 
of our normal feeling. It is hardly to be called humor 
at all ; certainly it is not a good humor. Nor is there 
any purpose in it; there is no irony in the paper, 
no satiric intent, no truth of any sort under the fool- 
ing. De Quincey pleaded the example of Swift in 
some of his grim jesting in Gulliver, or the famous 
" Proposal" for eating the children in Ireland. But 
there is no real similarity in the cases. Swift's papers 
are examples of the most awful satire ; Swift is in sad 
and terrible earnest. Similarly De Quincey might, 
one thinks, have written a satire, for example, upon 
the tendency of a certain school of dramatists to 
treat the seventh commandment as he had treated 
the sixth ; but he did not. He was aiming only to be 
facetious; and neither Adultery nor Murder as a 
Fine Art is matter for pure comedy. Another very 

M3 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

dreary form of De Quincey's attempts at humor is 
his heavy jocularity and vulgar slang, a sort of la- 
bored gaucherie. Throughout a long essay he calls 
the historian Josephus "Wicked Joseph," or "Mr. 
Joe"; he tells at great length, in another essay, the 
story of Bentley's famous lawsuit with Colbraith — 
whom he terms a "malicious old toad" — and at the 
end, or, as he puts it, "when the last round is over," 
he calls out : " Well, Colbraith, how do you find your- 
self by this time ? I think you'll not meddle with our 
Dick again" — our Dick being, of course, the great 
Richard Bentley. After quoting a passage from 
Cicero, he goes on, "After such a statement as this 
did Kikero not tumble downstairs and break three of 
his legs in his haste to call a public meeting ? " When 
he can no longer contain his astonishment or indig- 
nation, he will occasionally relieve himself, not by 
a good round "damn" — which would at least be 
spontaneous — but by some such elegant expletive 
as "O crimini!" This sort of thing from a man 
of culture is certainly surprising; but most readers 
will not deem it witty. He can now and then be 
sprightly and diverting without descending to this 
horse play, as, for example, in his banter upon Cole- 
ridge's two friends, Ball and Bell — Sir Alexander 
Ball who had no abstract ideas, and Dr. Andrew 
Bell who had two, one on the moon and the other on 
education. Yet even in such raillery he is never quite 

144 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

safe from some slip into vulgarity. His deliberate at- 
tempts at the facetious are always likely to be forced. 
His best humor seems quite unconscious, some form 
of that waywardness and whimsicality characteristic 
of his thinking. Mr. Bagehot says somewhere that 
there is humor in the thought of an immortal soul 
tying his shoe-string. It is this contrast between the 
infinite and the trivial, the strange immanence of the 
sublime in the commonplace, that fascinates De 
Quincey, and occasionally issues in passages of pe- 
culiar and genuine humor. 

But this sense of the infinite significance and sug- 
gestion in common things is best seen in De Quin- 
cey's many passages of pathos or sublimity. His 
imagination had power to interpret the wide possi- 
bilities latent in the present and the actual. He can 
trace with marvellous skill the subtle links of thought 
or feeling by which the simple incident, the passing 
emotion, may draw into the study of our imagina- 
tion a vast complex of experience, with all its contrasts 
of good and evil, of joy and sorrow. Thus while 
on a visit to Windsor he watches a group of young 
men and women in a contra-dance. This suggests 
to him, first, a protest against that tendency in all 
the arts to substitute the difficult for the beautiful 
which had almost pushed out of use this graceful, 
old-fashioned dance ; then comes a discussion — 
relegated to a page-long footnote — of the disputed 

L 145 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

etymology of the term " contra-dance " ; after this 
he gives a brief but subtle analysis of the emotion 
of "passionate sadness" evoked by the spectacle of 
the dance, and an explanation of the fact that all 
our highest and most festal emotions are tinged with 
melancholy; and then, at last, in a passage of lofty 
rhetoric and solemn music he renders the large 
imaginative significance of the scene with its vague 
power over our emotions : — 

"A sort of mask of human life, with its whole 
equipage of pomps and glories, its luxury of sight and 
sound, its hours of golden youth, and the intermin- 
able revolution of ages hurrying after ages, and one 
generation treading upon the flying footsteps of 
another; whilst all the while the overruling music 
attempers the mind to the spectacle, the subject to 
the object, the beholder to the vision." 

Any ordinary experience may suffice thus to set 
his imagination at work, and produce one of those 
purple patches that, everybody knows, are scattered 
so thickly though his pages. 

Closely akin to this feeling of indefinite emotional 
meanings inherent in common things was De Quin- 
cey's liking for mystery of every sort. He was used 
to say he could not live without it. He relished any 
tale of wonder, dreams, omens, popular superstitions, 
any mere cock-and-bull story. He wrote papers on 
146 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

Free Masonry, On the Order of the Rosy Cross, on 
the Pagan Oracles. The opening lines of Macbeth 
— the creepy chant of the witches — haunted him 
all his days; and his paper on the Knocking Scene, 
altogether apart from the characteristic subtlety of 
its reasoning, shows what a shudder that eerie bit 
of stage business gave to his imagination. But he 
had, at the opposite extreme of sensibility, a deep, 
half-mournful awe before the inscrutable mystery 
in which our lives are rooted. Always restless 
within the narrow limits of positive knowledge, he 
loved to send his thoughts out beyond those confines 
into that dim border-land of imagination and con- 
jecture where knowledge shades into wonder and 
loses itself in the dark profound. He had little of 
Wordsworth's interest in the common face of nature, 
but at times some sight or sound would lay sudden 
awe upon him — as that summer wind which began 
to blow while he stood by the corpse of his sister, 
hollow, solemn, Memnonian, as if it had swept the 
fields of mortality for centuries, the one audible sym- 
bol of eternity ! All his readers will remember pas- 
sages of speculation in which De Quincey is lifted 
into sublimity by his solemn sense of the infinity of 
all our human powers and affections. Like Sir 
Thomas Browne, whom he so much admired, he 
loved to pose his apprehension with mysteries, and 
pursue his reason to an O altitudol 

i47 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

After going over the whole body of De Quincey's 
Works, one is constrained to admit they contain 
rather surprisingly little of substantive and perma- 
nent value. The most industrious of writers, his 
energy was dissipated upon a multitude of curious 
topics, and he never finished, or even attempted, any 
work of signal importance. Of the practical, out- 
ward life of men, such a shy and secluded bookworm 
could have no real knowledge. He has really noth- 
ing to say upon all the urgent political and social 
questions that were agitating the minds of English- 
men all his lifetime. You will get no aid from him 
for the conduct of life. He lived in his own quiet 
world of books, of dreams, of memories. 

This statement suggests what is perhaps the sim- 
plest and best classification of his writings. With 
unimportant exceptions they fall into three groups, 
as they are concerned with his reading, his imagina- 
tion, or his personal reminiscences. In the first of 
these groups would be placed his papers on literary 
biography and history, on literary theory, and the 
purely critical appreciations of individual writers. 
The biographical sketches, like those of Shakespeare, 
Pope, Bentley, are always interesting, but they lack 
proportion. De Quincey cared little for the plain, 
outward facts that make up the greater part of 
every man's life, and was constantly drawn away to 
the more curious but less important phases of char- 
148 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

acter and action. Or, if his subject be one inviting 
epic treatment, like Joan of Arc, he may omit all 
historical detail and lift his essay into a kind of ode 
or heroic declamation. His more characteristic 
historical papers, however, are usually concerned 
with some of the enigmas or curiosities of history, 
The Essenes, The Pagan Oracles, The Character 
of Cicero, The Casuistry of Roman Meals, Judas 
Iscariot. But of the papers in this first group, 
the most valuable are not biographical or historical. 
Knowing far more of literature than of life, always 
interested in questions of rhetorical form, it was 
natural that De Quincey should put some of his 
best thinking into the essays on literary theory. He 
has perhaps nowhere written anything more thought- 
ful and fertile than the Letters to a Young Man, and 
the essays on Rhetoric, Style, and Conversation. 
These papers do not, indeed, make any systematic 
body of critical philosophy, but they abound in 
detached statements of principle, always penetrat- 
ing, and sometimes — like the distinction between the 
literature of knowledge and the literature of power — 
touching fundamental truth. It may be said, per- 
haps, that this famous distinction doesn't go quite to 
the root of the matter; De Quincey does not see 
clearly that the dynamic element in writing which 
he calls power is always emotion, and that he is 
really distinguishing, not between two kinds of 

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literature, but between literature and science. Yet 
the passage is one of the most suggestive in modern 
critical writing; and you will hardly read a half- 
dozen pages in these literary papers without getting 
some such fillip to your thinking. 

It must be admitted that De Quincey's literary 
theory is frequently warped or narrowed by his 
personal preferences. Every critic, I suppose, is 
inclined to mistake the dictates of his own taste 
for universal laws; De Quincey was especially 
liable to this error. He too often assumes that the 
forms of excellence he himself had attained or appre- 
ciated are the standards of all good writing. For' 
example, he pronounces the essential and preemi- 
nent virtue of style to consist in the vital connection 
of successive sentences, not merely the mechanical 
linkings of grammar and rhetoric, but the way in 
which each sentence seems to beget the next, so that 
the thought seems growing before you as you read. 
To use his own pet word — which be borrowed 
from Coleridge — a good style is before all things 
"sequacious." He thinks Lamb's writing lacks 
this virtue ; he criticises Johnson for the want of it ; 
while he finds it the secret of Burke's undoubted 
mastery. Well, this is certainly a merit of good 
writing ; and it is just the merit especially necessary 
and especially difficult with a habit of thought like 
De Quincey's. For to render the nice distinctions 
150 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

of his analysis, the subtle blendings of his feeling, 
the vague shapes of his fancy, and at the same time 
to follow the devious course of his reflection, to call 
back the digressions that dart out constantly to 
either side of the line of his discussion, to herd the 
wayward multitude of his thoughts into something 
like unity and keep them moving in one direction, — 
all this not only demands a vast vocabulary, but it 
strains to the utmost the mechanics of rhetorical 
connection. De Quincey was past-master in all 
the arts of excursus, parenthesis, transition, what 
the rhetoricians call " explicit reference." He uses 
more dashes to the page than any other prose-writer 
of equal eminence, and yet you never quite get 
lost in his paragraph. He was pardonably proud 
of having attained this particular virtue of style 
in such high degree; but he forgot that an author 
of different mental habit might have no need for it, 
and that most delightful English may be written 
which is not at all "sequacious." And what was 
worse, his insistence upon this virtue blinded him 
to the importance of some others. He blamed 
Johnson for always looking backward upon his 
thought, for framing his sentences mentally one by 
one before he uttered them. But we may blame 
De Quincey for an opposite and perhaps a worse 
fault; his thought does grow under his handling, 
but we never know whereunto it will grow. He 

I 5 I 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

doesn't know himself. He has no foresight of the 
end from the beginning. The result is that his 
writing is often quite formless. His essay is seldom 
a clear-cut, well-shaped thing. There is no outline 
in his work, and hence no symmetry. 

The authors he himself most admired and imi- 
tated are early seventeenth-century prose men, 
especially Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne. 
He has their volume, their elaborate stateliness of 
movement. Sometimes he reproduces, consciously 
or unconsciously, the very imagery and rhythm of 
some great passage in his models. Every one who 
has read them will remember the solemn words 
with which Walter Raleigh closes his History of 
the World : — 

"O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! Whom 
none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what 
none hath dared, thou hast done ; and whom all the 
world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the 
world and despised; thou hast drawn together all 
the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, 
and ambition of man, and covered it all over with 
these two narrow words, 'Hie Jacet'!" 

It is impossible to doubt that De Quincey had 
these magnificent lines in memory when he wove 
that famous purple patch which closes one section 
of the Confessions : — 

152 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

" O just, subtle, and all-conquering opium ! that 
to the hearts of rich and poor alike, for the 
wounds that will never heal, and for the pangs 
of grief that tempt the spirit to rebel, bringest 
an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with 
thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes 
of wrath, pleadest effectually for relenting pity, 
and through one night's heavenly sleep callest 
back to the guilty man the visions of his infancy 
and hands washed pure from blood; O just and 
righteous opium! that to the chancery of dreams 
summonest, for the triumphs of despairing innocence, 
false witnesses, and confoundest perjury, and dost 
reverse the sentences of unrighteous judges ; — thou 
buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the 
fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples, 
beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles, beyond 
the splendors of Babylon and Hekatompylos ; and 
'from the anarchy of dreaming sleep,' callest into 
sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties, and 
the blessed household countenances, cleansed from 
the ' dishonors of the grave.' Thou only givest these 
gifts to man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, 
O just, subtle, and mighty opium!" 

This is De Quincey's best manner; every epithet 
justly chosen, disclosing sudden glimpses of vast, 
vague imagery, filled with a lofty melancholy, and 

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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

moving with a slow and solemn stepping rhythm. 
And everybody knows that there are near a score of 
such passages in De Quincey's pages. If they are 
inferior to the best things in Taylor and Browne, — 
and they are, — it is only because De Quincey is 
just a little grandiose. It is art, not nature. He is 
building the lofty line; whereas the rhetoric of 
Taylor or Browne is natural, inevitable — they can 
no other. And here again De Quincey falls into the 
error of measuring all literature by the quality he 
most admires. He pronounces this lofty, ornate 
manner the supreme, distinctive rhetorical excellence. 
Rhetoric, he says, is "the art of aggrandizing and 
bringing out into strong relief, by means of various 
and striking thoughts, some aspect of truth which 
of itself is supported by no spontaneous feelings, 
and therefore rests upon artificial aids." Such a 
definition makes of rhetoric an artifice rather than 
an art, a means of giving extrinsic interest to truth 
rather than of disclosing its inherent power and 
beauty. It describes pretty accurately much of 
De Quincey's writing, but it does not apply with 
any precision even to the elaborate manner of Taylor 
and Browne, and still less is it a good definition of 
rhetoric in general. And if it is said that De Quincey 
is here using the term " rhetoric " in a technical sense, 
as denoting a special form of literary effect, it must 
still be urged that some such definition is assumed 

i54 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

in his critical verdicts upon all sorts of writing. He 
had no feeling for the charm or the strength of 
simplicity. He complains of Lamb that "the 
gyrations within which his sentiment wheels are the 
briefest possible," and that he "sinks away from 
openings suddenly offering themselves to flights of 
pathos or solemnity"; forgetting that he, Thomas 
De Quincey, might well have afforded to pay a 
king's ransom if he could have written a single page 
of such English as Lamb's Dream Children. His 
remarks upon the style of Swift are absurd, assuming 
as they do that the only form of English to be ad- 
mired is that of the Opium-Eater. Any honest 
skipper, he says, can write like Gulliver, but suppos- 
ing Swift had been set to write a pendant to Raleigh's 
great apostrophe to Death — quoted above — 
"what sort of a ridiculous figure," cries he, "would 
your poor, bald Jonathan have cut?" Yes, and 
suppose, as Leslie Stephen suggests, Thomas De 
Quincey had been set to write another Drapier's 
Letter? If any man thinks himself able to write 
as Jonathan Swift wrote, he may very easily convince 
himself of his error by trying it. Swift meant busi- 
ness. He wasn't writing in an opium revery. His 
style is hard as nails. It was written for shop- 
keepers; but it frightened kings and ministers, and 
it will be found good stuff after most of De Quincey's 
purple patches have gone to the rag-bag of oblivion. 

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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

These remarks may suggest De Quincey's limi- 
tations as a critic. He has been much admired in 
that capacity. His editor and biographer, Mr. 
Masson, pronounces him facile princeps among the 
critics of his generation; but this is extravagant, 
even for. an admirer. He certainly gives us many 
penetrating glimpses into the philosophy of criticism, 
but in the ability to apply critical principles to the 
interpretation or estimate of particular works, in 
sanity of judgment and breadth of appreciation, 
he is by no means the equal, I should hold, of 
Coleridge, Hazlitt, or Lamb. Merely as a reviewer, 
Jeffrey is the better man. For that kind of work 
De Quincey had no liking. He preferred to study 
the man rather than the book. In fact, he says in 
the opening passage of his essay on Wordsworth's 
poetry, 1845, that up to that time he had "never 
attempted an examination of any man's writings." 
He made no critical estimate of any of the great 
poets contemporary with himself. Even of the 
writers he admired most, the early seventeenth-cen- 
tury men, he has left no careful critical study. 
Milton, one thinks, is the English poet he might 
have discussed with most sympathy and illumina- 
tion; but he has no criticism on Milton's work 
except two or three fragments of little value. In 
his professed critical papers, as in the biographical, 
he is on the hunt for something recondite, and loses 

156 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

no opportunity to start a train of ingenious conjec- 
ture. He overreaches himself by his own subtlety, 
and often fails in the first requisite of the critic, a 
sympathetic perception of the central quality of his 
author. Acute and suggestive, he is nevertheless 
always liable to sacrifice his grasp of a work as a 
whole to the discussion of some finicky detail. And 
occasionally his verdicts are simply perverse or 
freakish ; the essay on Pope is full of such. 

Moreover, the range of his critical appreciation 
was sharply limited. He was as insular as the most 
hide-bound Briton. The manners of all the Latin 
races, he says, are based on a want of principle and 
a want of moral sensibility. He never would admit 
that anything good came out of France. In speak- 
ing of the relations of French and English literature 
he declares that "no section whatever of French 
literature has ever availed to influence in the slight- 
est degree or to modify our own"; a statement that 
betrays either such ignorance or such obstinate 
prejudice as to discredit whatever he has to say of 
our eighteenth-century writers. Nor is it race 
prejudice only that narrows his vision. As a critic 
of poetry, he was deficient in the sense of form, and, 
in spite of the pretensions of his own prose-poetry, 
he was deficient in the sense of rhythm. The music 
of verse appealed to him only when it was organ- 
like, Miltonic. In truth, the only two elements 

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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

in literature he ever really cared much for were the 
mysterious or recondite, and the sublime; and he 
liked best that writing in which the two were some- 
how combined. Those masterpieces of literature 
which depict broad, simple action from obvious 
motives had no interest for him. He lived half his 
life in Edinburgh; but I find no positive evidence 
that he ever read his Walter Scott. Even the sub- 
lime he did not appreciate unless there were some- 
thing grandiose or spectacular in it, something 
more properly to be called magnificent. Milton 
he thought sublime; Homer, not at all. I doubt 
whether he thought the first verse of the first chapter 
of Genesis sublime ; I can imagine what a rhetorical 
bravura he would have written upon it. In short, 
he narrowed greatly the range of his criticism by 
renouncing at once half the material out of which 
the best literature must be wrought — the lucid, 
obvious truths of life; and then by holding per- 
sistently to a conception of rhetoric which tended 
to confound art with artifice. 

But it is in the second of the three groups into 
which all De Quincey's writing may be divided 
that we shall find the work that he himself most 
prized, and that is probably most interesting to 
readers of to-day. Here we may place all those 
passages that are the immediate product of his 

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THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

imagination, — the dreams and visions of the 
Confessions and the Suspiria de Profundis ; the 
records of his childhood in which memory passes 
so insensibly into revery that he cannot tell what 
was fact and what was dream ; narratives like those 
of the English Mail Coach, in which the story is 
enveloped in an atmosphere half feeling and half 
fancy; and those Dream Echoes in which some 
of the intenser moments of experience repeated 
themselves in image and music. This visionary 
gift was not due chiefly to his opium. " Habitually 
to dream magnificently," he says, "a man must have 
a constitutional determination to revery." That is 
what De Quincey always had. He was a dreamer 
by nature. His imagination loved to luxuriate in 
vast, dim-lighted spaces, in vague and awesome 
revery. He himself accounted this faculty as one 
of our most precious endowments, and lamented 
its inevitable decline under the pressure and hurry of 
our material age. 

"Let no man think this a trifle. The machinery 
for dreaming planted in the human brain was not 
planted for nothing. That faculty, in alliance with 
the mystery of darkness, is the one great tube through 
which man communicates with the shadowy. And 
the dreaming organ, in connection with the heart, 
the eye, the ear, composes the magnificent apparatus 

iS9 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

which forces the infinite into the chambers of a 
human brain, and throws dark reflections from 
eternities below all life upon the mirrors of that 
mysterious camera obscura — the sleeping mind." 

The Confessions, he averred, were written origi- 
nally with a view to revealing the power of 
dreaming that is latent in every man; and this 
mood of lofty revery recurs frequently throughout 
all his later writing. The most effective passages 
of this sort are those most spontaneous, when the 
imagination in solemn forms, touched with some 
vague melancholy, rises directly out of some deep 
or intense emotion; like that hollow Memnonian 
sound heard at the bedside of his dead sister, or 
those cloudy visions of palm trees and vanishing 
faces in the far vault of heaven that haunted him 
after his sister had gone. The Dream Echoes and 
parts of the Suspiria are more artificial and hence 
less impressive. One has a suspicion that De 
Quincey is forcing his mood a little — at least 
inviting it. 

It is these more studied passages that best exem- 
plify the peculiar literary form in which, by striking 
imagery and especially by a certain imposing rhythm, 
De Quincey attempted to secure the effects of poetry 
without the use of metre. It is to be doubted, how- 
ever, whether the attempt is altogether successful, 

1 60 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

much as De Quincey prided himself upon it. Metre 
is not an arbitrary accompaniment of poetry, a 
separable ornament; it is the poet's natural voice. 
The attempt, therefore, to dispense with it, while 
retaining the imagery and heightened emotion of 
poetry, inevitably produces a sense of artificiality. 
You get a kind of bastard product, neither prose nor 
verse and without the charm of either one. There 
is, moreover, a special reason why such passages 
as these should be in verse. It seems to be only the 
musical element in speech that can lay the question- 
ing intellect asleep and take us into the mood of 
dream. Surprise — which is a sudden shock to 
reason — is never known in dreamland. We are 
terrified there, or delighted to the verge of ecstasy; 
but nothing seems improbable to us until after we 
have waked. It is in such a temper, if I mistake 
not, that we read Shakespeare's Midsummer-Night 1 s 
Dream or Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. And the 
effect in either case would be impossible without 
the exquisite music of the verse which enchants us 
and deludes. But De Quincey's Dream Echoes 
hardly produce any such sense of illusion. They 
lay no spell upon our reason. They are evidently 
composed. De Quincey says, "Go to, I will now 
dream dreams. " We see how he does it; he is 
making a re very. 

From such strictures one passage must be excepted, 
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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

— and it is a great exception, — the vision of the 
"Three Ladies of Sorrow." Cut away the intro- 
ductory paragraphs about Levana and the needless 
paragraph of personal application at the end, cut 
away the rubbishy footnotes, and you leave these 
three figures standing sad and stately in our imagina- 
tion. This is not a dream begotten of opium upon 
idle fancy; here the imagination of De Quincey 
has wrought upon the deepest experiences of universal 
humanity. These three — Mater Lachrymarum, 
Mater Suspiriorum, Mater Tenebrarum — they 
may not yet have crossed our path, we may not yet 
have heard their voice; but some glimpse as from 
a distance, some shadow of their awful forms, every 
son of man has known or some day shall know. 
As has been truly said, they are an addition to the 
mythology of the human race, as solemn as the 
Fates or the Furies. But nowhere else has De 
Quincey done anything quite like this. 

But after all, perhaps there is nothing in the whole 
body of De Quincey's work more valuable than 
his rambling papers of personal reminiscence; and 
there is pretty certainly nothing more diverting. It 
is to them we must look for a series of intimate 
portraits of some of his most important contempo- 
raries, in their habit as they lived. The shy and 
retiring little man loved to study his friends in the 
homely circumstance of their daily life, divested of 
162 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

their robes of state or of song. He had an almost 
feminine nicety of observation that nothing escaped, 
and a quick eye for those slight peculiarities of 
appearance and manner in which character uncon- 
sciously reveals itself. Without his Recollections our 
picture of the group of poets in the Lake District 
would lose almost all its vivid details. It is gossip, 
to be sure, but the gossip of a scholar and a thinker, 
who sees the significance of what to others would 
seem trifles. Doubtless the naive frankness with 
which he put his gossip into print was sometimes 
sufficiently annoying to the subjects of it. For he 
could now and then descend to mere tittle-tattle, 
flavored with a little half-conscious personal malice. 
Like Mr. Boswell, De Quincey would probably 
have declared himself unwilling to " mitigate the 
asperity of his portraits" to please anybody; yet 
I suspect it was not solely to his pure love of truth 
that we owe the information that Mr. Wordsworth 
had bad legs and drooping shoulders; that there 
was a curious variation in the brilliancy of his eyes, 
due probably to the condition of his stomach; that 
he was constitutionally so rigid of nature that people 
wondered how he could ever have condescended to 
the humiliations of courtship; that in Mrs. Words- 
worth's eyes — those " stars of twilight fair" — there 
was considerable obliquity of vision, which ought to 
have been repulsive and yet was not ; that Dorothy 

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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Wordsworth had refused several offers of marriage, 
one, to his personal knowledge, from Hazlitt (which 
probably was not the fact) — and much other matter 
of this sort, perhaps beneath the dignity of full- 
dress biography. It is likely, however, that such 
details, though doubtless censured by our superior 
sense of propriety, add to our interest in De Quincey's 
story. Of course it was wrong of him; but our 
human curiosity often enjoys what our more rigid 
judgment may not approve. And what a thoroughly 
human, lifelike picture it is ! There was a Words- 
worth the Stamp Distributor as well as a Wordsworth 
the Poet; and I, for one, am glad to know both. 
As to Dorothy Wordsworth, the most genuinely 
poetic character in the group, De Quincey's account 
of her is worth all the rest that has been written of 
her. And Coleridge, to whom he was never quite 
so just, Southey, Wilson, Charles Lloyd, the Simpsons, 
and the rest, they are all real and living in his gar- 
rulous page. 

One closes an essay on De Quincey with some mis- 
givings as to its justice. But a critic may plead, in 
excuse for his imperfect appreciation, that there 
are few writers of whom a just estimate is so diffi- 
cult. Few have put so much thinking into their 
work to so little purpose. He is certainly very full 
of matter. What he might have accomplished if the 
subtle spirit of opium that colored his dreams had 

164 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

not robbed him of the power of systematic and fruit- 
ful thinking, it is impossible to say. As it was, he 
had no message to deliver; he did not influence in 
any wise the thought of his age ; he left no work in 
which vital truth takes on finished shape, or any of 
the great forces of life are presented in the forms of 
a healthy imagination. I should hold, therefore, 
that, while he was a most curious personality and 
a very remarkable writer, he can hardly rank with 
such masters of modern prose as Thomas Carlyle 
and John Ruskin. 



165" 



JOHN WILSON 

I 

De Quincey, in his delightful recollections of 
the English lakes, relates that one night, about 
three hours past midnight, a young man, as yet 
pretty nearly a stranger to the Lake Country, — but 
I suppose it was the Opium-Eater himself, mooning 
about after this custom, — had strolled up to White 
Moss Common above Grasmere Lake, when he was 
startled by a wild bull that came puffing and labor- 
ing up the mountain road. A moment later there 
appeared in chase three horsemen, and the bull 
turned and plunged down to the marshy ground at 
the head of the lake, but soon dislodged thence, 
came forging up the hill again. The leading horse- 
man, a towering figure crowned by a flood of yellow 
hair, and grasping a wooden spear fourteen feet long, 
now shouted, "Turn that villain, turn that villain, 
or he will take to Cumberland!" De Quincey 
turned the bull, — or says he did ; I always have had 
my doubts about that, — and the cavalcade rushed 
past in the dim light of the morning, leaving him 
1 66 



JOHN WILSON 

wondering whether they were not creatures of 
vision and dream. 

This, if .1 am right in thinking the "young man" 
of the story to be De Quincey himself, was his first 
meeting with John Wilson. It was a very char- 
acteristic one; John Wilson was usually on some 
high horse, and riding at a reckless pace. Only 
about a year before, in 1807, twenty-two years of age 
and just out of the University, he had come to live 
at Elleray on Lake Windermere. He had made a 
record for brilliant though desultory scholarship 
in Oxford, had inherited from his father a handsome 
fortune, had more health and high spirits than he 
knew what to do with, and so now, with no very 
definite purpose or career in mind, he selected one of 
the loveliest spots in England and sat himself down to 
enjoy the goods of life. Few men ever had a keener 
relish for all the healthy pleasures of a rational 
animal. A goodly man to look upon. Standing 
full six feet, broad-chested, sinewy; shaking back 
from his massive forehead his dishevelled mane of 
tawny hair; a resonant voice and a resistless vigor 
in his movements, — he seemed a big, good-natured 
Goth. At the University he was remembered for 
his prowess and a certain genial impudence rather 
than for any more distinctively academic attainments. 
He had measured twenty-three feet in a running 
jump; after a dinner in London one night he had 

167 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

covered the fifty-nine miles back to the college in 
nine hours ; he had knocked out the toughest pugi- 
list in Oxford. Here in his life at Elleray as a 
country gentleman, he prided himself on keeping all 
his manly accomplishments well in practice. "A 
fine, gay, girt-hearted fellow," said one of his rustic 
neighbors, "as Strang as a lion, and as lish as a 
trout, an' he had sic antics as never man had." 

But he was a very soft-hearted giant, whose exu- 
berant sentiment was always running over into 
sentimentality. From his earliest manhood his 
emotions were effusive rather than steady, and his 
actions were largely decided by impulse. During 
his first college year he had formed an attachment 
for a certain Margaret, which seems to have been 
genuinely impassioned and lasted some seven years. 
But his mother, for some unexplained reason, was 
unalterably opposed to their union; and Wilson, 
like Gibbon, sighed as a lover and obeyed as a son. 
Which would seem to indicate, either that the 
mother had an unusually strong will, or the son an 
unusually weak one; it probably indicates both. 
Wilson certainly sighed a good deal ; memory of his 
early passion frequently gives a sentimental tinge to 
his later writing — especially in the paper entitled 
Streams. But not long after taking up residence at 
Elleray, he met a high-spirited girl, the belle of the 
Lake District, of a temperament well fitted to 
1 68 



JOHN WILSON 

sympathize with his own. John Wilson and Jane 
Penny were married in 1811, and their domestic 
life for twenty-five years exhibits all that is best in 
Wilson's character. 

These early years at the lakes, however, gave 
little promise of public work of any sort. He had 
cherished since his college days some literary aspira- 
tions, and chose his residence at Elleray partly on 
account of the neighborhood of Wordsworth, 
Southey, and Coleridge. The year after his marriage 
he published a thin volume of dilute, sentimental 
verse, which most readers to-day will pronounce 
hardly worth while. But the life at Elleray was too 
full and satisfying to admit any strenuous ambitions ; 
it was only a lucky stroke of misfortune that threw 
him upon his own resources and forced him to show 
what stuff there was in him. In 181 5, through the 
mismanagement or treachery of a friend, he lost 
practically the whole of his fortune. The blow, 
however, was not crushing; his mother, whose for- 
tune was not impaired, was living in her own house 
in Edinburgh, and invited her son with his family 
to take up residence with her. Wilson accepted 
the invitation, and the same year was called to the 
bar. His legal experience was neither very extended 
nor very remunerative; but his year and a half of 
"walking the Parliament House" served to bring 
him into acquaintance with a little group of young 

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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Edinburgh men, one of whom was that brilliant 
and audacious genius soon to be associated with him 
in the decisive work of his life, John Gibson Lock- 
hart. 

Another of Wilson's new acquaintances was young 
William Blackwood, whose handsome new shop in 
Princess Street was just then a favorite resort of 
bookish people. Mr. Blackwood was a man of 
energy and ideas. He had succeeded in building 
up a prosperous business as a bookseller, and he 
was Edinburgh agent for the great Mr. John Murray 
of London; but his ventures as a publisher thus 
far had not been so successful. His rival, Constable, 
had captured the two most famous publications 
of the early century, the Edinburgh Review and the 
Waverley Novels. Nothing daunted, however, Black- 
wood risked a new venture. He determined to have 
a periodical of his own, Tory in politics to match the 
Whig Edinburgh. He wisely decided not to com- 
pete with the Edinburgh in its own field, but to 
make his periodical a magazine rather than a re- 
view, inviting the ablest and most brilliant contrib- 
utors, but admitting a wider variety of composition 
and more vivacity of treatment than would be appro- 
priate in the staider pages of a review. Unfortu- 
nately, he at first accepted as editors two men quite 
incompetent to realize his ideal, who, much to his 
vexation, termed his ambitious magazine " our 

170 



JOHN WILSON 

humble miscellany," and filled up its early numbers 
with dull rubbish. Mr. Blackwood stood it for 
six months, when he dismissed the incapables, took 
the magazine into his own hands, and looked about 
for some better editors. The two young fellows, 
Wilson and Lockhart, had been in his shop almost 
daily for a year, and he had observed their rampant 
Toryism, their brilliant talk, their wide acquaintance 
with books and men. He determined to secure 
their services for his enterprise, and while retaining 
general supervision of the magazine himself, to 
intrust to them all details of its editorial conduct. 

In October, 1817, appeared the first number under 
the new management, the seventh of the series, but 
the first real Blackwood's Magazine. It came upon 
the decorum of Edinburgh like a thunderclap out of 
a clear sky. The public, that for six months had 
found in Mr. Blackwood's innocent periodical little 
more exciting than the price of pigs and poultry, 
was surprised to see this harmless thing changed into 
the most audacious of journals, that scattered per- 
sonalities right and left and had no fear of dignities. 
Edinburgh society was especially scandalized by 
the last article in the number. Few people nowa- 
days know or care anything about this once famous 
"Chaldee Manuscript"; but seldom has any fugi- 
tive magazine article created such a commotion. It 
was a satirical account of Blackwood's quarrel with 

171 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

his first editors and of his rivalry with Constable 
and the Edinburgh; and it introduces under a thin 
disguise not only Blackwood and his editors, old and 
new, but Constable, Jeffrey, Walter Scott, and a 
number of other prominent persons in the little 
world of Edinburgh society. It is doubtless a 
clever skit, but its humor — which is said to have 
convulsed Scott with laughter — will hardly prove 
irresistible to the modern reader. Its allusions are 
purely local, and could not have been understood 
outside the little circle of Edinburgh. The paper is 
a curious proof at once of the purely provincial 
character of Edinburgh literary society, and of the 
spirit of local mischief, of a pure lark, rather than of 
serious literary endeavor, with which these young 
fellows entered upon the new enterprise of edit- 
ing a magazine. The reader of to-day, moreover, 
will be puzzled to know why it should have ruffled 
the proprieties so much. Its satirical use of Scrip- 
ture phrase probably displeased some good folk, 
and it certainly treated the big-wigs of Edinburgh 
with considerable levity; but there is nothing really 
profane in it, nor are its personalities of a sort, one 
thinks, to give serious offence. But in deference to 
public sentiment it was withdrawn, — after it had 
sold off the first edition of the magazine, — and is 
not now to be found in most sets of Blackwood. 
In fact, there were much worse things than the 

172 



JOHN WILSON 

" Chaldee Manuscript " in this first number of Black- 
wood. The opening paper is a review of Coleridge's 
Biographia Literaria, probably written by Wilson. 
It has the boisterous manner and reckless epithet 
always too characteristic of his critical writing. 
The paper misses altogether the wealth of critical 
principle contained in this certainly rather form- 
less book, and is throughout only a vulgar, derisive 
attack upon Coleridge himself. The author of the 
Ancient Mariner, so the critic avers, has written 
nothing worthy of remembrance save a few wild 
and fanciful ballads, yet he is "so puffed up with a 
miserable arrogance" that he seems to consider the 
mighty universe itself "nothing better than a mirror 
in which, with a grinning and Miotic self-compla- 
cency, he may contemplate the physiognomy of 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge." There are twenty 
pages of such stuff as this, written, as the critic avers 
with a pious smirk, not in the cause of literature 
merely, but in the cause of morality and religion, 
lest Mr. Coleridge should be held up as a model to 
the coming generation. Later on in the same num- 
ber is the first of that notorious series of articles 
on "The Cockney School of Poets," the author- 
ship of which has never been definitely determined, 
but which were probably written in part by Wilson, 
in part by Lockhart, and in part, also, by that swash- 
buckling Irishman, William Maginn. The worst 

*73 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

of them, the infamous paper on Keats, was published 
in August of the next year; but they are all filled 
with violent personalities, and as literary criticism 
are practically worthless. 

The utmost that can be said for much of the 
writing in the early volumes of Blackwood is that it 
was prompted by a certain boyish hilarity rather 
than by any real malignity. Determined above all 
things that their magazine should not be dull, the 
two young editors laid about them recklessly, with 
very little regard for precision or propriety. They 
were always ready for a fight or a frolic, and liked 
best some combination of the two. Mr. Blackwood, 
repeatedly threatened by suits for libel, tried now and 
then to put some check upon his riotous team; but 
he was gratified to see his magazine making a stir 
in the world, and usually gave them free rein. For 
some eight years the practical conduct of the maga- 
zine was in their hands. In 1822 they began that 
famous series of papers in dialogue, the Nodes 
AmbrosiatUB, which contains Wilson's best work. It is 
not certain which of the two men is to be credited 
with the original conception; they seem to have 
contributed about equally to the earlier numbers, 
sometimes writing together and sometimes separately. 
Some assistance, though probably not much, was 
given by James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, and 
Maginn — who figuresas O'Doherty — seems to have 

i74 



JOHN WILSON 

had some part in a few of the more hilarious papers. 
But from first to last the real author of the Nodes 
was Wilson. Lockhart was never a jovial or even 
a genial man ; there was too much gall in his humor 
— "the scorpion that stings the faces of men," as 
he was well characterized in the "Chaldee Manu- 
script"; but Wilson's exuberant spirits, his effusive 
comradeship, his profuse sentimental rhetoric, all 
chimed exactly with the temper of the Nodes. After 
1820, Lockhart's intimate relations with Scott — 
whose daughter he had married — drew him some- 
what away from the magazine; and in 1825 he went 
to London to assume editorial control of the Quar- 
terly Review, and left the conduct of Blackwood's 
entirely to Wilson. For the next ten years it was 
Wilson's magazine. He decided what contributors 
should be admitted, and he put in whatever of his 
own he wished. His biographer gives a list of two 
hundred and thirty-nine articles written by him in 
these ten years, aggregating about four thousand 
pages. 

With all his editorial work Wilson had given 
much time, since 1820, to the duties of another 
position, that, one thinks, should have called for 
more dignity than the young fellows in Mr. Black- 
wood's editorial rooms were accustomed to wear. 
In that year he offered himself as a candidate for the 
professorship of moral philosophy in Edinburgh 

175 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

University. The chair had been occupied by such 
eminent Scottish philosophers as Dugald Stewart and 
Thomas Brown. Wilson's rival in the candidacy 
was Sir William Hamilton, who had almost every 
qualification for the place, while Wilson, to say the 
truth, had almost none. He was, moreover, known 
to be the leading spirit in the conduct of the periodical 
that for nearly three years had scandalized grave 
Edinburgh folk by its boisterousness and its auda- 
cious personalities. But the election was a partisan 
affair, and Wilson won, as a Tory — with "influ- 
ence." He occupied the chair until 1852, two 
years before his death. He was an entertaining, some- 
times an eloquent, lecturer, and the charm of his 
personality made him popular in the class room, as 
everywhere else; but it cannot be said that, either 
by speculation or research, he ever much widened the 
bounds of knowledge in his department. His first 
interest was always in literature; and although he 
lectured for more than thirty years, he never cared 
enough for his lectures to print anything from them, 
save some few papers in the Blackwood, most of these 
not of sufficient importance to be included in the 
collected edition of his works. 

The income from his professorship, together with 

the liberal payments from Mr. Blackwood, soon 

placed him beyond financial anxiety. His estate 

at Elleray he had never sold, and after 1823 he was 

176 



JOHN WILSON 

able to spend his summers there regularly, with his 
family about him. He genuinely loved the country; 
only twice in the last thirty years of his life did he go 
up to London. It is at Elleray that one likes best 
to picture him, in his later as well as in his earlier 
years — under the great sycamore that still spreads 
its venerable arms over the little cottage that had been 
his first and best-loved home there, watching his 
game-cocks and rollicking with his dogs, rowing on 
the lake or racing up the hill behind it with a crowd 
of shouting children to watch the long panorama 
of cloud and mountain from Orrest Head ; striding 
with giant pace over the road to Rydal to look in upon 
Wordsworth or upon that best-beloved of all the 
Lakers, little Hartley Coleridge, at the Nab ; joining 
with the lusty rustics in the annual Grasmere sports, 
and proving himself still in the wrestling "a verra 
hard un to lick " ; keeping the gamesome spirits of 
youth quite down to the verge of age. He liked all 
sorts and conditions of active men, and used to say 
he thanked God he had never lost his taste for bad 
company. The homely folk of the Lake Country, 
who only knew Wordsworth as an odd party who 
made verses, knew John Wilson as a "gert, good 
feller." His memory is still green in all the Winder- 
mere region. 

The current of this joyous life flowed unbroken 
till his wife died suddenly in 1837. He was never 
n 177 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

the same man after that. His connection with the 
magazine had not been so close since the death of 
the elder Blackwood, in 1835, and his contributions, 
though they continued till the very last year of his 
life, now became much less frequent. Something 
of the pathos of age was coming over him. Elleray 
he found too lonely for summer residence. His 
children married, and though still living near 
him, went out of his Edinburgh home. He was 
still the big, leonine man, but his temper was mel- 
lowed very much. It is true he would never quite 
give up his pet aversions; he could write of Keats 
with unrepentant vulgarity years after Keats had 
gone, and could jeer at Hazlitt in the old bitter 
fashion. Yet the widening of the circle of his 
personal acquaintance to include many of his old ad- 
versaries, and the certainty that the measures he had 
opposed were not working disaster to the state, com- 
bined with the natural effect of age and sorrows to 
soften the asperity of his opinions and make him 
more tolerant and gentle. His one immortal sen- 
tence is characteristic of those latest years: "The 
animosities are mortal, but the humanities live for- 
ever." His health, which he had doubtless drawn 
on rather heavily, hardly fulfilled the extravagant 
promise of his youth. In 1852 he was forced by 
growing weakness to resign his chair, and two years 
later he died, cheerful, if not buoyant, to the last. 

178 



JOHN WILSON 

It was shortly before his death that he met, after 
long absence, his old associate Lockhart, now, 
like himself, pathetically broken by sorrows and 
bereavement, and, unlike Wilson, embittered and 
cynical, " a weary old man," as he said, "fit now for 
nothing but to shut myself up and be sulky." Four 
months later he followed his friend. Little, withered 
Mr. De Quincey, who for half a century had kept 
his system in a pickle of laudanum, though born in 
the same year as Wilson, outlived him five years, 
dying at the riper age of seventy-four. 

II 

If we would estimate the literary work of Wilson, 
we must credit him, first of all, with having found 
out how to edit a magazine. For the instant success 
of Blackwood? s , as well as its continued prosperity 
for more than twenty years, was due more largely 
to Wilson than to Lockhart. There is doubtless 
more finish in Lockhart's work; his keen and caustic 
satire is cruelly effective, and he was, I think, an 
abler critic than Wilson. But Wilson had a more 
intimate sympathy with his readers, a quicker sense 
of what would interest or amuse them at the moment ; 
and above all he had an exuberant vitality, an 
immense volume of good spirits that seemed to per- 
vade the magazine. He may almost be said to have 

179 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

introduced a new style into English periodical 
writing; he shocked the proprieties hardly more by 
his matter than by his manner. His style is collo- 
quial to the last degree; it is the man himself. The 
personal note is dominant, to be sure, in all the essay- 
ists of the period; but the others, Hazlitt, Lamb, 
De Quincey, as we have seen, recognized literary 
standards, admired and imitated certain literary 
models. Wilson, on the other hand, simply let 
himself go. He is sentimental, or abusive, or hilari- 
ous, as the mood takes him; but he is always rhetor- 
ical, profuse, careless of decorum. Of course in 
such writing you will not expect nicety of judgment, 
chasteness or precision of phrase. Wilson writes 
as the traditional Irishman played the violin, "by 
main strength." But there is great personal force 
in such a manner; it is big John Wilson talking, 
declaiming, jesting, shouting from the page. The 
unpardonable sin in the columns of a magazine is 
dulness; and Wilson is never dull. 

As to the permanent literary value of his work, 
that is another matter. For one thing it was usually 
done in too much haste to be lasting. Acting on 
the convenient motto, "Never do to-day what you 
can put off till to-morrow," he would postpone his 
writing to the last moment, and then, locking him- 
self in his study, turn off sheet after sheet, with amaz- 
ing rapidity, sometimes writing a whole number of 
1 80 



JOHN WILSON 

the Nodes at a sitting. His biographer says he once 
wrote fifty-six double-column pages of print for 
Blackwood 1 s in forty-eight hours. But it is art that 
tells in the long run; extempore writing thrown off 
at such a dizzy rate could not have received much 
artistic care. Such a rush of manner, though it may 
carry you away at the moment, is likely to weary 
after a little. We crave some repose, some tem- 
perance of feeling, delicacy of sentiment. The 
very qualities that gave its buoyancy to this writing 
at the time are peculiarly liable to evaporate in the 
course of a century. The effervescent humor has 
lost its bubble now, and tastes a little flat on the 
palate. A style so highly exhilarated doesn't keep 
well. And what is worse, this exaggerated animation 
suggests something factitious; we suspect it to be 
got up to order, like the devotional moods some 
pious people induce by rubbing their hands together. 
The man, we say, makes too much fuss over expres- 
sion, and although going at full speed, doesn't seem 
to get on. Nor is it only his form that suffers; 
his opinions are often ill-considered, his critical 
verdicts hasty and sometimes contradictory, his 
rough-and-ready censure of men and measures rash 
and indiscriminate. His energy has too little intel- 
lectual quality; it often seems nothing but the 
expression of a full and healthy physical life. We 
shall have to admit that in all respects Wilson was 

181 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

a good deal of a Philistine. I should like to have 
heard the late Mr. Matthew Arnold express his opinion 
of him — and I should like to have heard him express 
his opinion of the late Mr. Matthew Arnold. The 
amenity, the fine reserve, the urbane superiority, 
the distrust of enthusiasms, the aversion for the raw 
and the hasty — all those qualities that went to the 
making of our great critic would have been shocked 
by every page that Wilson ever wrote. One can 
imagine, for example, Arnold's fine contempt for the 
horse-play of this passage in which Wilson is com- 
menting on that amazing critical opinion of Jeffrey's 
— quoted on a previous page — which puts Rogers 
and Campbell above all their contemporaries : — 

" Two living poets, however, it seems there are who, 
according to Mr. Jeffrey, are never to be dead ones — 
two who are unforgettable, and who owe their immor- 
tality, — to what, think ye ? — their elegance ! That 
gracilis puer, Samuel Rogers, is one of the dual 
number. His perfect beauties will never be brought 
to decay in the eyes of an enamoured world. He is 
so polished that time can never take the shine out 
of him ; so classically correct are his charms that to 
the end of time they will be among the principal 
Pleasures of Memory. Jacqueline in her immortal 
loveliness seeming Juno, Minerva, and Venus all 
in one, will shed in vain ' such tears as angels weep ' 
182 



JOHN WILSON 

over the weeds that have in truth ' no business there ' 
on the forgotten grave of Childe Harold! Very 
like a whale ! Thomas Campbell is the other pet- 
poet — the last of all the flock. Ay — he, we allow, 
is a star that will know no setting; but of this we 
can assure the whole world, not excluding Mr. 
Jeffrey, that were Mr. Campbell's soul deified, and a 
star in the sky, and told by Apollo, who placed him 
in the blue region, that Scott and Byron were both 
buried somewhere between the Devil and the Deep 
Sea, he, the author of "Lochiel's Warning," would 
either leap from heaven in disdain, or insist on there 
being instanter one triple constellation. What to 
do with his friend Rogers, it might not be easy for 
Mr. Campbell to imagine or propose at such a criti- 
cal juncture; but we think it probable that he would 
hint to Apollo, on the appearance of his Lordship 
and the Baronet, that the Banker, with a few other 
pretty poets, might be permitted to scintillate away 
to all eternity as their — tail!" 

Not unamusing, and very characteristic of Wilson 
in its contempt for mere elegance; but it hardly 
has that high seriousness Mr. Arnold used to exact 
of the critic. 

But the most serious discount from the permanent 
value of Wilson's work is the lack of any central 
purpose. The great masters of prose, Burke, Car- 
lyle, Newman, Ruskin, Arnold, even the novelists 

183 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

as Thackeray and George Eliot, have been very 
much in earnest over something. You can see in 
all their work certain dominating ethical ideas which 
they are bent on imparting or enforcing. Even a 
Philistine with a message is likely to make the world 
listen to him. But Wilson, so far as I can discover, 
had no message. For some thirty years he read 
lectures on ethics — I judge pretty much the same 
lectures — to classes in Edinburgh University ; for 
the rest, he wrote for Blackwood's Magazine. He 
had to keep the printer's devil in copy, and he took 
care that what he furnished should not be dull ; but 
it is vivacity rather than earnestness that his writing 
shows. As leading editor of a pronounced Tory 
magazine, he was bound to observe a journalist's 
consistency; but while we need not question the 
sincerity of his views, the eagerness of his political 
writing seems to proceed rather from partisan feeling 
than from any profound conviction. He loved the 
stir and warmth of controversy, and with his cock- 
sure opinions and his command of imaginative epi- 
thet, controversy was certain to be both spirited and 
picturesque ; but he cannot be called the consistent 
and resolute advocate of any cause. In his mis- 
cellaneous, discursive papers, like the Nodes, he 
touches a wide variety of topics without special 
personal interest in any, or seeming to feel a call to 
convince or persuade us of anything. There is 

184 



JOHN WILSON 

no real urgency in the man. Even in his critical 
verdicts it is difficult to trace any consistent prin- 
ciples. As a result, his taste was never sure. In his 
own writing he never quite perceived the difference 
between the humorous and the hilarious, between 
comedy and buffoonery, between pathos and bathos. 
He records his impressions of men and books in 
lively, often in very emphatic, language; but they 
are capricious and sometimes conflicting. When 
in his moods he is liable to damn his most favorite 
idol. If there were two authors whom he intelli- 
gently and consistently admired, they were William 
Wordsworth and Walter Scott. Yet one day, writ- 
ing for the Nodes, in a freakish mood, 1 not content 
with calling a certain Mr. Martin "a jackass," — 
which perhaps he was, — he went on to relieve his 
gall yet further by remarking that Wordsworth often 
wrote like an idiot, and never more so than in his 
great sonnet on Milton; that he was becoming less 
known every day; that he ludicrously overrated 
himself; that he had thrown no light on man's 
estate; that Crabbe stood immeasurably above him 
as a poet of the poor ; and that the Excursion was the 
very worst poem of any sort in the English language. 
And then, as if that were not enough for one fit, a 
little later in the same paper — and remember this 
was in 1825, when the great Sir Walter was the god 
1 Nodes, No. 22, September, 1825. 

18s 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

of the literary world's idolatry — he declares that 
Scott's poetry is often very bad, and that, except when 
his martial spirit is up, Scott is "only a tame and 
feeble writer." But the week after, when his paper 
got into print, he was in a blue, shivering terror over 
what he had done, and averred in a letter to Black- 
wood * that he would rather die that night than own 
those passages to be his. In truth, while Wilson had 
physical courage in abundance, of moral courage he 
seems to have had very little, and when a bit fright- 
ened he could roar you as gently as any sucking dove. 

Ill 

Wilson dabbled in so many varieties of composi- 
tion that it is a little difficult to classify his work. 
The collected edition of his writings includes, besides 
the Nodes, a volume of verse, a volume of Tales 
and Sketches, two volumes of papers called Recrea- 
tions, but best described as Out-of-Door Sketches, 
and four volumes of critical and miscellaneous 
writing in great part culled from his contributions to 
Blackwood's. The verse need not long detain us. 
His longest poem, The Isle of Palms, which was 
planned and in part written as early as 1805, is in- 
teresting as being, at least in conception, an early 
specimen of the romantic school of poetry. It was 

a See the correspondence in Mrs. Oliphant's William Black- 
wood and his Sons, Vol. I, Chap. 6. 

186 



JOHN WILSON 

probably suggested by some of Southey's big ro- 
mances ; the metre, at all events, is clearly reminis- 
cent of Southey. It is an odd mixture of wildly 
improbable incident and very sweet sentiment. On 
the deck of a great ship, bound we know not whither, 
are a lover and a lady ; when suddenly the ship is a 
wreck, and all on board are lost save those two. A 
kindly fortune washes them together on some shore 
where it seems inconvenient to stay, and then provides 
a boat to waft them to the Isle of Palms. In this 
tropic paradise they live for years, wedded by fate, 
the only inhabitants of the isle. A child is born to 
them, and grows to young maidenhood, a sylvan 
sprite, with no knowledge of the wide world's wicked- 
ness. But at last a passing ship takes them off, and 
brings them safely back to Liverpool and prose, when 
the husband and family, we are left to infer, settle 
down comfortably with his mother-in-law in Wales. 
To tell us this precious tale takes some four thousand 
lines ; but it is hardly exaggeration to say that Wilson 
never wrote a line of genuine poetry. He lacked the 
gift of compression and the gift of melody, and uni- 
formly diluted his passion into a gush of lukewarm 
sentiment. 

Nor are the Tales much better. They are stories 
of humble life, and most of them are meant to be 
very pathetic. Their subjects are not cheerful, as 
may be inferred from some of the titles — The 

187 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Lover's Last Visit, The Headstone, The Elder's 
Death Bed, Consumption, and others of the same 
complexion. Running through them again recently, 
I computed that they average almost exactly two and 
one-half deaths to each tale — which is depressing. 
Besides this high mortality there is a large assort- 
ment of childless widows, broken hearts, forsaken 
maidens, family Bibles, churchyards, and deserted 
cottages. When Wilson makes an attempt upon our 
sensibilities he is not to be satisfied with any halfway 
effects. The obverse of any healthy pathos is usu- 
ally humor ; but Wilson seems afraid of mixing them, 
and there is hardly a gleam of humor in these Tales. 
It is to be feared, however, that to see this boisterous 
sentimentalist grow willowy and lachrymose some- 
times does provoke from the irreverent reader a 
smile. His style, too, is not realistic or natural, but 
rhetorical and melodramatic. Fancy a peasant 
girl as she meets a friend she has not seen for some 
time breaking out after this fashion : — 

"For mercy's sake ! Sit down, Sarah, and tell me 
what evil has befallen you ! For you are white as a 
ghost. Fear not to confide anything to my bosom; 
we herded sheep together on the lonesome braes — 
we have stripped the bark together in the more 
lonesome woods; we have played, laughed, sung, 
danced together; we have talked merrily and 
1 88 



JOHN WILSON 

gayly, but innocently enough surely, of sweethearts 
together ; and, Sarah, graver thoughts, too, have we 
shared, for when your poor brother died away like a 
frosted flower, I wept as if I had been his sister; nor 
can I ever be so happy in this world as to forget him. 
Tell me, my friend, why are you here, and why is 
your face so ghastly?" 

"A plague upon sighing and grief," says FalstafT, 
"it blows a man up like a bladder!" Wilson's 
sentimental style seems to have suffered in that way. 
It is not full; it is inflated, dropsical. There is 
none of the strength of reticence in it, none of the 
simplicity of nature. All his sentimental writing, 
indeed, is lush ; the Scotch have a word that often 
fits it still better — it is "wersh." 

Among the miscellaneous writings are several 
papers of a purely critical character, of which the 
most important are those on Burns, on Coleridge, on 
Wordsworth (made up of several shorter notices 
fused into one) on Macaulay's Lays of Ancient 
Rome, and the once famous — or notorious — 
review of Tennyson's first volume. None of these 
can be given a very high place in the body of English 
critical literature. Wilson's opinions, as we have 
seen, depended greatly on his moods, and we never 
can be quite sure that the verdict of to-day is not to 

189 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

be contradicted by the verdict of to-morrow. His 
criticism is based on no defined principles, and of 
necessity, therefore, is often arbitrary and capricious. 
Indeed, he seldom makes any attempt at systematic 
and reasoned estimate of the work under examina- 
tion ; he simply sets down — usually in very pro- 
nounced fashion — his own impulsive feeling about 
his author. His criticism is the record of John Wil- 
son's likes and dislikes. Hence it is likely to be very 
exaggerated and very diffuse. In the 1834 paper on 
Coleridge — which may have been designed as a 
kind of apology for the scurrilous article that opened 
the first number of Blackwood's — he occupies near a 
score of pages with quotations and mere rhapsodical 
eulogy thereon. Two-thirds of the paper on Ma- 
caulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, one of the best 
of his reviews, is taken up with rambling talk about 
the younger contemporary poets. Everywhere he 
gossips and comments, rather than interprets. But, 
at all events, his criticism, though sometimes wrong- 
headed, is sincere and hearty. It is never the dry, 
technical jargon of the professional critic. Wilson's 
appreciation was certainly limited. He liked senti- 
ment and action in their pronounced forms ; he dis- 
liked weakness, prettiness, over-refinement. It was 
inevitable that this big-chested critic with a voice 
like a megaphone, who admired Macaulay's drum- 
and-trumpet Lays, should think little of John 
190 



JOHN WILSON 

Keats, and should deride the owls and mermen, and 
"airy, fairy Lillians" of young Mr. Alfred Tenny- 
son. Yet within his limits, if we will make allow- 
ance for occasional personal prejudice, Wilson's 
appreciations and aversions are quite intelligible, 
and command our interest if not always our agree- 
ment. When he heartily enjoys a book, his com- 
ments are sure to be stimulating, and are sometimes 
really incisive. And even when he has a mind to 
scourge, so long as he is only recounting his own 
genuine feeling, and not feeding some personal or 
political spite, he seldom goes far wrong. Tenny- 
son not unnaturally took umbrage at the roughness 
with which Blackwood handled his maiden volume; 
but it may be noticed that the ripening taste of the 
poet removed from the second edition of the volume 
most of the poems on which "crusty Christopher" 
had laid his big ringer. In a word, Wilson is a pleas- 
ant commentator, but not a great critic. His spon- 
taneous judgments are usually well enough ; he is not 
always wise when he attempts to justify them. In- 
deed, much of his best literary criticism is to be found 
in the brief, incidental comment and opinion scattered 
through his miscellaneous writings. There are many 
of these excellent obiter dicta in the Nodes. 

Far better than the tales or the criticism are the 
out-of-door papers. In them Wilson is nearly at his 
very best. To be sure, here as everywhere, Chris- 

191 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

topher seems in a state of over-exhilaration. His 
fancy is too flamboyant, and his manner vagarious 
to the last degree. In the course of half an hour's 
walk his remarks will range from the nature of Deity 
to the best breed of game-cocks, and leave you hardly 
a moment to look about you. In the midst of a 
hunting excursion in the wild Highland Glen Etive 
he cannot repress a full quarter-hour sermon — 
apparently to his dogs. Yet in these papers there is 
nothing factitious; the enthusiasm is not forced. 
They are full of space and breeziness. Christopher 
is in the open, where he was born to be, and the fresh 
air goes to his head. Mr. Saintsbury pronounces 
Wilson's descriptions of scenery better than anything 
of the kind in English prose; but I think he must 
have forgotten a good deal to say that. I should 
rather say that Wilson had not in any high degree the 
gift of description proper. There are, to be sure, 
many vivid and beautiful glimpses in his pages ; but, 
as a rule, he does not set the landscape before you. 
What he can do is to make you feel his own joy in 
it. In reality he is not describing the scene, he is 
relating his own experience. Any one who had never 
taken the walk from Ambleside to Grasmere by the 
west bank of Rydal would hardly be able to form any 
picture of it from Wilson's paper, A Stroll to Gras- 
mere; but to one who knows and loves that loveliest 
of English walks, the paper will be a delight, recall- 
192 



JOHN WILSON 

ing at every sentence some fair glimpse or cherished 
memory. Similar comment might be made upon the 
fancy-touched picture of Edinburgh in The Moors, 
or the various scenes in the Day on Windermere. 
And, although Wilson was an out-of-door man, he 
never had the keen eye of the naturalist, or the love 
for particular forms and phases of nature. He was 
no Thoreau, who could " name all the birds without 
a gun," and was in league with the trees of the field. 
Wilson always loved nature in her larger masses and 
more striking aspects. Moreover, he never cared 
much for still life. His scene is usually the setting 
for some form of strenuous activity. He must have 
walking, and riding, and rowing, and swimming, 
and hunting, and fighting, — all the joys of healthy 
animal life. His love for horses and dogs makes 
many pages of very good reading. I don't know 
whether this generation reads any longer Christo- 
pher's account of his ride on Colonsay; but if it 
doesn't, more's the pity. Old Colonsay is one of 
the best horses that have ever got into books. While 
as to the dog Flo, his glorious encounter with the 
drunken carter's mastiff, and the general engagement 
that followed between the schoolmaster with his boys 
and the village tradesmen on the one side, and the 
infuriated carters with a gang of gypsies and a band 
of brawny Irishmen on the other — that is a classic, 
one of the best fights in literature. In all these 
o i 93 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

outdoor papers Wilson's animation is contagious. 
You shall not read a dozen pages without an access 
of health, a tightening of muscle, a new realization 

" How good is man's life, the mere living ! How fit to employ 
All the heart, and the soul, and the senses forever in joy ! " 

But it is in the Nodes that we must look for the 
fullest display of Wilson's powers. Here his imagi- 
nation, his wisdom, his satire, his pathos, his exuber- 
ant humor, are all seen at their best. Nothing else 
so well shows his almost marvellous affluence and 
volubility. It can hardly be necessary to explain 
that the Nodes are a series of papers in dialogue, 
recounting the converse of a jovial company of 
Blackwood's men who are supposed to meet for an 
occasional night of good fellowship around the table 
of a famous Edinburgh tavern, Ambrose's — whence 
the name, Nodes Ambrosiance. It is not certain 
with whom the plan of the series originated. His 
friends were inclined to claim that credit for William 
Maginn, the boisterous Irishman who figures, as 
Ensign O'Doherty, rather more prominently than 
any one else in the first eight or ten numbers. Pro- 
fessor Ferrier, Wilson's editor, on the other hand, is 
confident that the suggestion came from Wilson, 
though he will not admit the first eighteen papers to 
the collected edition of the Works. Whoever planned 
the Nodes, the first half-dozen numbers give scanty 
194 



JOHN WILSON 

evidence of Wilson's genius. After that there are, 
I think, increasing marks of his hand, and when, 
about 1825, he took the series entirely under his 
control, the papers gain immensely both in manner 
and content. After about that time most of them 
were written entirely by him, and his temper domi- 
nates them all. He also changed the plan of the 
series so as to give it greater unity, and some individu- 
ality to the speakers. The early papers introduced 
a considerable number of persons, of various sorts 
and conditions, and the speech and manner of each 
were imitated with only very moderate success. 
Wilson wisely abandoned this attempt to represent 
with dramatic fidelity many different persons, and 
reduced the speakers to three: Christopher North, 
who stands for Wilson himself ; Tickler, who is said 
to have been suggested by an uncle of Wilson, Robert 
Sym ; and the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. There 
is, indeed, no very distinct individuality in these 
three; they are only three persons in one John 
Wilson. But they enabled Wilson to express dif- 
ferent sides of his character, different phases of his 
feeling. Christopher North, who speaks chiefly as a 
kind of interlocutor to suggest or guide the talk, is 
Wilson in his staider moods, with a tendency to 
philosophic reflection in rhetorical forms; Tickler 
is Wilson in his occasional moods of prosaic common 
sense, trying to be a man of affairs with a vein of 

i95 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

cynicism; the Shepherd is Wilson the poet and 
humorist letting himself go. Naturally, therefore, 
the Shepherd is the most interesting of the trio, and 
comes nearest to being an independent character. 
He was doubtless studied directly, though very freely, 
from the original. Hogg had been an occasional 
contributor to Blackwood's ever since the famous 
" Chaldee Manuscript," — of which he claimed to 
be the author, — and by 1825 was one of the most 
picturesque figures in Edinburgh literary society. 
The real Hogg, however, was clearly very much ideal- 
ized in the Shepherd of the Nodes, and in some of 
his letters shows an odd mixture of vanity and vexa- 
tion at seeing himself translated into so large a type. 
The colloquy as a literary form has some manifest 
advantages. It enables you to prove anything, by 
making one of the disputants a man of straw. It is 
also an excellent device for self-flattery. You have 
only to divide yourself into two persons and then let 
each flatter the other. North is forever admiring 
the Shepherd's rhapsodies or dissolving in tears at 
his pathos; while the Shepherd is forever holding 
up his hands in awe at North's eloquence. "O 
man, man ! but ye're an orator — the orator o' the 
human race!" Certainly a manner so discursive 
and rambling as Wilson's found in the Nodes the 
best possible form of expression. Impulsive, senti- 
mental, he had little power of connected thinking, 
196 



JOHN WILSON 

and could rarely keep himself to one theme for ten 
minutes together. But in the jovial evenings around 
the board at Ambrose's, connected thinking would 
be only another name for dulness. Politics, criti- 
cism, philosophy, sentiment, fancy, are mixed in this 
rushing flow of talk and enlivened by jest, and story, 
and song. Within a half-dozen pages you may come 
upon a resume* of German contemporary philosophy, 
an account of a dog fight, an estimate of Wordsworth's 
poetry, a scathing denunciation of the Cockney school 
of poetry, a bravura of sentimental rhetoric over a 
Scotch moonrise, and a comic song; and the whole 
fairly boiling and bubbling with good spirits. Possi- 
bly the modern reader may suggest that something 
of the exhilaration of the Nodes is due to spirits of 
another brew. Wilson, like old Ben Jonson, was 
no man to sing 

" My mind to me a kingdom is, 
While the lank hungry belly cries for food," 

and the amount swallowed, both of solids and 
liquids, at each of the Nodes is certainly something 
enormous. I believe Mr. Saintsbury (who rather 
prides himself as an authority upon such matters) 
pronounces the Gargantuan exploits at Ambrose's 
table quite within the limits of possibility, only sug- 
gesting that there were too many oysters for the 
Glenlivet. On these questions I pretend to no 

197 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

opinion; but I well remember the shock of mild 
surprise my callow youth received on first reading the 
Nodes, on the recommendation of a worthy doctor 
of divinity much enamoured of them. And I still 
incline to doubt whether the less valorous appetites 
of to-day will quite assent to the confident assertion 
of the Shepherd* " There does not at this blessed 
moment breathe on the earth's surface ae human body 
that doesna prefer eating and drinking to all ither 
pleasures o' body or soul. . . . Eat an drink wi' 
all your powers — moral, intellectual, and spiritual. 
This is the rule." The Shepherd follows his rule 
very closely. On a fair computation, about a quarter 
of all the talk in the Nodes is devoted to meats and 
drinks and the effects thereof. 

Of course all this is a Barmecide feast — only a 
device to afford expression for Wilson's extravagant 
high spirits. Ambrose's was, in fact, not at all the 
abode of oriental splendor it appears in Wilson's 
pages, but only a plain Edinburgh tavern; and if 
Wilson and Sym and Hogg ever did foregather 
there, their potations were doubtless very moderate. 
Their talk in the Nodes is by no means the talk of half- 
befuddled men, whose god is their belly and who mind 
earthly things. It is mostly very good talk indeed, 
playing over all sorts of subjects with quick intelli- 
gence, and glowing with fun and fancy. There are 
198 



JOHN WILSON 

bits of excellent criticism in it, not quite dissolved 
in a wide welter of words. In fact, as already re- 
marked, Wilson's literary criticism is often at its 
best in these incidental comments struck out in the 
heat of conversation. There is hardly a paper in 
which the Shepherd does not inquire after "ony thing 
gude in literature." The verdicts are usually very 
positive ; books, new or old, are praised and damned 
without any nice qualifications of sentence. More- 
over, the plan of the Nodes serves to disguise Wil- 
son's frequent inconsistencies; for on such jovial 
occasions the opinions of the critics will naturally 
vary with their moods, and Wilson as Christopher 
must inevitably often disagree with Wilson as the 
Shepherd. But, taken together, the papers afford 
an interesting conspectus of literary news and criti- 
cism for some ten years. And there is a deal of sound 
sense — of a rather high Tory sort — on a great 
variety of other matters, on current politics and states- 
men, on social questions, on education, on religion, 
on public morals — on all topics in which a well-fed 
Scot might be expected to take interest. But, of 
course, the suppers at Ambrose's were not intended 
primarily as Aids to Reflection. The great charm of 
the Nodes is the buoyant, ebullient life that pulses 
all through them. These men have the gift, not 
very common in colloquial writing, of " making you 
of their company anon," as Chaucer says. And if 

199 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

they are a little boisterous in tone, and their humor, 
now and then — as the Shepherd owns — "a bit 
coorse," yet it is the clean mirth of robust and 
healthy men. In these days when so much hectic, 
morbid, neurotic literature is offered for our recrea- 
tion, it is pleasant to join sometimes the company of 
these red-blooded persons who don't enjoy poor 
health. 

The Shepherd, in particular, is delightful. In his 
talk you get Wilson's humor, sentiment, and imagi- 
nation in their superlative forms. The humor 
cannot be called quiet or delicate ; yet the Shepherd 
has store of neat quips and jests, and now and then 
strikes out a vivid portrait in few words — as of 
Lockhart, "a pale face an' a black touzy head, but 
an ee like an eagle's, an' a sort o' lauch about the 
screwed-up mouth o' him that fules ca'd no canny, 
for they could na thole the meanin' o' 't." Some of 
his satiric hits are very good, as when he hopes there's 
many an incident in the Excursion he has forgotten, 
"for I canna say I reclet ony incident at all in the 
haill poem, but the Pedlar's refusin' to tak a tumbler 
o' gin an' water wi' the solitary. That did mak a 
deep impression on my memory, for I thocht it a most 
rude an' heartless thing to decline drinkin' wi' a 
gentleman in his ain house; but I hope it wasna 
true, an' that the whole is a meleegnant invention o' 
200 



JOHN WILSON 

Mr. Wordsworth." The Shepherd's anger, too, 
sometimes inspires passages of hearty Scottish male- 
diction that are animating reading. But best of all 
are his passages of flamboyant, full-length descrip- 
tion or narrative. The Shepherd's imagination, 
like his humor, is very profuse; it revels in details 
and lavishes adjectives. Yet the resulting picture is 
always real and glowing. His account of the Ex- 
plosion of a Haggis, of his Robbing of an Eagle's 
Nest, of Christopher's Fishing, of the Glasgow 
Dog Fight, his contrasted description of the squalor 
of Morning in Old Edinburgh, and Daybreak 
in the Ettrick Valley, his delightful defence of 
Sleeping in Church, — these, with half a hundred 
other passages, will occur to all lovers of the Nodes 
as striking examples of the union of effusive senti- 
ment or humor with vivid and realistic detail. They 
are better than the similar rhetorical fantasies and 
elaborate pathetic passages in Wilson's other works, 
because they seem more spontaneous. And, al- 
though his characteristic manner fairly runs riot in 
them, the Scottish dialect gives them a homely natu- 
ralness and keeps their sentiment from getting 
mawkish. 

On the whole, we may admit that Wilson could not 
add much to the world's knowledge, and that he did 
little to champion any reform or advance. His 
prejudices were obstinate, his judgments often ca- 

201 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

pricious or perverse. He lacked fixed and reasoned 
convictions; he lacked steadfast earnestness of re- 
solve. We distrust the sanity of his opinions and the 
consistency of his conduct. Moreover, his mind 
would not work steadily at low pressure. As a re- 
sult, his writing has no repose, no quiet certainty of 
manner; he is liable to fatigue us, after a little, by 
the very noise of his enthusiasm. Yet it is assuredly 
one of the offices of good literature to cheer and in- 
vigorate, even to amuse, as well as to inform or in- 
spire. And few writers of his generation contributed 
more to the literature of cheer than Wilson. It was 
no slight service to keep before the public for a score 
of years a personality so healthy, a temperament so 
optimistic and joyous. His humor, to be sure, is not 
of the gentle variety that enlivens five o'clock tea, 
but it is never merely bacchanalian — which makes 
the dreariest of all writing. Even in the most ex- 
hilarated passages of what Carlyle unjustly calls 
"his drunken Nodes" there is far more of cheer 
than of inebriation. If Wilson, on the Moors or at 
the table of Ambrose, does not forget that man is an 
animal, he always remembers that he is a rational and 
spiritual animal. He has a healthy appreciation not 
only of the joys of sense, but of all the beauty of the 
world, and of all the manifold humors of man and 
womankind. It is impossible to rise from an hour 
with him without feeling that life is worth living, that 

202 



JOHN WILSON 

"A merry heart goes all the day, 
Your sad tires in a mile-a." 

In the merciless winnowing of time all of his verse, 
all the Tales, and most of the criticism will doubtless 
fall into oblivion — nay, have already descended 
thither. But the wholesome Out-of-Door Papers 
and the Nodes ought to live at least another century 
as part of the literature of invigoration. In them 
Christopher and the Shepherd are too much alive 
soon to die out of the memory of men who love good 
fellowship and hearty cheer. 



203 



LEIGH HUNT 



Leigh Hunt was certainly not a great writer nor a 
great man. One short poem, familiar to everybody, 
— the Abou ben Adhern, — and two or three other 
short poems that deserve to be familiar are all the 
verse he ever wrote of any real merit; while as to 
the prose, though much of it is entertaining and some 
of it of real value as criticism, there is no passage 
in the whole body of it that, either for weight of 
thought or finish of style, can be called classic. 
Much of his writing, perhaps most of it, belongs 
rather to journalism than to literature, entertaining 
to-day, forgotten to-morrow. No uniform edition 
of his works has ever been issued ; many of the books 
have already fallen so far into obscurity that it is 
difficult to get a complete set of them together. If 
his reputation is to be measured by the permanent 
value of the writing he has left us, he can hardly be 
sure of a place in our literary history. That, doubt- 
less, is the only ultimate measure of fame for any 
author; but meantime Leigh Hunt deserves to be 
204 



LEIGH HUNT 

remembered another century, not only as a pleasing 
writer, but as a man of original though limited genius, 
and of a personality that, in spite of its blemishes, 
certainly had a peculiar attraction for many greater 
men than himself. With a most hearty love for 
books and all bookish things, he always sought the 
companionship of men of letters, and his genuine 
kindliness, his sprightly converse, his taste, keen and 
delicate, if not broad or sound, always made him 
welcome. The cheery, chirruping, effervescent little 
optimist was the friend of two generations of literary 
men, and seems omnipresent in literary society for 
fifty years. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, 
Keats, Moore, Lamb, Hazlitt, Crabb Robinson, 
Haydon, Talfourd, Charles and Mary Cowden 
Clarke, Wilson, Lockhart, Murray, Macaulay, 
Forster, Dickens, Thackeray, Browning, Mrs. 
Browning, Lord Houghton, the Carlyles, Rossetti, 
William Bell Scott, Lowell, Hawthorne, Motley, — 
Leigh Hunt knew every one of them, and turns up 
somewhere in the memoirs or correspondence of 
every one. His own letters are perhaps quite as 
interesting as his other prose writing, yet it is evident 
that they miss the vivacity of his presence and con- 
verse. A reputation like this, based not so much 
upon the value of a writer's work as upon the breadth 
of his acquaintance and the elusive charm of his 
personality, is likely to leave the literary critic some- 

205 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

what at a loss, or to beguile him into gossip and 
reminiscence. 

The account of his parentage which Hunt gives 
in his Autobiography makes it evident that he came 
honestly by his characteristic traits both of temper 
and of belief. His father, Isaac Hunt, was a West 
Indian sent from the Barbados in his boyhood to 
be educated in Philadelphia. He took the degree of 
Master of Arts both in Philadelphia and in New 
York, — so his son says, — and then decided not to 
return to the Barbados, but to remain in America 
and enter the profession of law. His commencement 
oration in Philadelphia must have been of an elo- 
quence rather unusual in that variety of address; 
for two young ladies fell in love with him on hearing 
it — which may have had something to do with his 
decision to remain in America. At all events, he 
married the younger of the two. The other one, 
by the way, married the artist, Benjamin West, and 
showed very substantial friendship for the Hunts 
in their later seasons of adversity. When the Revo- 
lutionary War broke out, Isaac Hunt's loud-spoken 
British loyalty exposed him to rough handling in 
Philadelphia, and he escaped to London, leaving 
his wife and child to follow some months later. 
Once there, he speedily exchanged law for divinity, 
and on her arrival in London Mrs. Hunt found her 
husband an eloquent preacher, with crowds of 

206 



LEIGH HUNT 

carriages at his church door and throngs of delighted 
ladies hanging on his utterances. But it was soon 
noticed that the eloquent preacher drank too much 
claret, and owed too much money. In truth, he had 
no depth or steadiness of character. He could never 
understand the nature of a financial obligation, — 
a weakness that he bequeathed unimpaired to his 
son, — and after the first flush of prosperity, was 
always running behind the constable. Leigh Hunt * 
says the first room he himself remembers being 
inside of was a debtor's jail. But nothing could 
depress Isaac Hunt's easy good nature; he was al- 
ways vivacious and hopeful, even unconcerned. As 
to his religious beliefs, if he had any, they must have 
been of a very gelatinous sort ; he seems to have slid 
easily down the scale of heterodoxy from one ism to 
another, till he landed in a sort of benevolent indiffer- 
entism. His son, who always showed an amiable 
charity for his father's failings, says with delightful 
naivete, " While he was not a hypocrite, my father 
was not, I must confess, remarkable for being ex- 
plicit about himself." 

But Hunt's picture of his mother, in the early 
chapters of the Autobiography, is one of the most 
beautiful tributes of filial affection in our literature; 
it is impossible not to have a kindly feeling for the 
man who could write it. She was a gentle, sad- V 
faced woman, with a liking for a little music and all 

207 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

the gracious domesticities of life, and with a tempera- 
ment as pensive as her husband's was mercurial. 
She could not sympathize with his cheerful incapacity ; 
and the long struggle with poverty early wore out her 
strength and her spirits. Hunt could not remember 
to have seen her smile, "save in sorrowful tender- 
ness." But she was full of pity for the hardships of 
others ; it was the taking off her flannel petticoat to 
clothe a freezing woman she met on the street that 
fixed upon her a rheumatic affection for life. As her 
son truly says, "Saints have been made for charities 
no greater." She imparted to her children — at all 
events to Leigh — something of her own extreme 
• sympathy for all pain, and her own dislike of any- 
thing violent or overstrenuous, even in language. 
Hunt says that when his childish anger once found 
relief in a word that probably did not give the record- 
ing angel much concern, he himself was tormented 
by conscience for a week, and couldn't receive a bit 
of praise or a pat of encouragement without thinking 
to himself, " Ah, they little suspect I am the boy who 
said, 'Damn it!'" 

The young Leigh Hunt got his temperament 
mostly from his father, and his training from his 
mother. The results were not altogether fortunate. 
At the age of eight he was entered at Christ's Hospital 
School — just after Coleridge and Lamb had left it. 
Old Dr. Bowyer — whom Coleridge declared to be 
208 



LEIGH HUNT 

ready to flog anybody except a cherub, all head and 
wings, whom he couldn't flog — was still master 
there, and it might have been supposed that his 
vigorous discipline, with the rough experiences of an 
English boys' school, would have knocked a little 
robustness into Hunt; but, on the contrary, it de- 
veloped a sort of priggish gentleness not altogether 
becoming a genuine boy. A square, good-natured 
fight now and then would probably have been good 
for him ; but he refused to strike. He plumed him- 
self on saying what he chose in any quarrel, and then 
quietly taking the consequences. That was what 
he called a moral victory. He said with evident 
satisfaction, fifty years afterward, "I gained the 
reputation of a romantic enthusiast whose daring in 
behalf of a friend or a good cause nothing could 
put down." It is clear enough that, even in his 
school days, he began to show that jaunty humility 
and pride of martyrdom which his critics later found 
so exasperating. To provoke your enemy to smite i 
you on the one cheek in order that you may have the 
proud satisfaction of meekly turning to him the other, 
is not exactly the conduct enjoined by Scripture; 
but Hunt dearly loved to do it, and began the practice 
very early. 

On leaving school at sixteen Hunt did not go on " 
to the University, but drifted for a time. The only 
ambition he had thus far developed was to put his 
p 209 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

name in the roll of English poets. He confesses 
that he had not yet learned the multiplication 
table, — indeed, I don't think he ever did quite 
master that mystery, — but he had written a good 
many verses; about a year and a half after leaving 
school he published a thin volume of them. His 
father got him a handsome list of subscribers, and 
the verses were thought by some less partial critics 
to be rather clever. The generous public, I believe, 
bought rather more copies of them than of a volume 
of Lyrical Ballads issued about a year before. The 
success of his venture confirmed his poetical inclina- 
tions, and he contributed occasional verse to various 
periodicals during the next half-dozen years. But 
his literary aspirations was soon turned in another 
and more fortunate direction. His father gave him 
— he does not say just when — a set of the eighteenth- 
century essayists, of whom he had hitherto been 
almost entirely ignorant. He devoured them all. 
Goldsmith's papers in the Bee and Citizen of the 
World, and the rather mild humor of Colman and 
Thornton in the Connoisseur, gave him, he says, all 
the transports of a first love. He set himself to 
imitate these models in a series of papers for a Lon- 
don journal; he began to write theatrical notices; he 
lost no opportunity to get himself naturalized in 
Bohemia by cultivating the acquaintance of journal- 
ists, critics, and men about town; he diligently ex- 

210 



LEIGH HUNT 

tended his reading in that kind of prose in which he 
was ambitious to excel. He was especially attracted 
by the brilliant satire and caustic wit of Vol- 
taire; and as he could not read him in the original, 
went through the greater part of his writings in trans- 
lation. He was not frightened, he remarks inciden- 
tally, by Voltaire's attacks on orthodoxy; as, indeed, 
it was impossible he should be. For before he was 
out of his teens, Hunt had reduced his theological 
creed to the one proposition that every created being 
is destined to eternal happiness — or, as he some- 
times puts it, everything that happens must, in the 
long run, be best for everybody; and he rejected 
without much consideration any doctrines that con- 
flicted, or even seemed to conflict, with this comfort- 
able belief. His political creed was hardly more 
definite or more well considered. He only knew he 
was in favor of change and reform everywhere, 
and opposed to all institutions intrenched in privi- 
lege. This was the training and equipment he 
brought to his first important enterprise, the edit- 
ing of a radical journal. 

It was in 1808 that, in concert with his elder 
brother John, who was a printer, he set up a weekly 
paper, of which the two brothers were to be joint 
editors and proprietors. It will be remembered 
that this was the time when Austerlitz, Jena, and 
Friedland had carried Napoleon almost to the sum- 

211 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

mit of his resistless career; when those sanguine 
young Englishmen who, some twenty years before, 
had hailed with joyful anticipation the revolutionary 
movement in France, had now long since given up 
those early hopes and gone over to the majority; 
when conservatism in England was having everything 
its own way, and to utter liberal opinions was to incur 
the suspicion of disloyalty to the British constitution 
and even risk of personal arrest. To set up a liberal 
paper at such a moment implied a little courage; 
but it also involved just that defiance of authority 
and chance of persecution always attractive to 
Hunt. The Examiner was not to be a dangerously 
radical sheet. It upheld the British constitution. 
It regarded the later stages of the French Revolution 
with abhorrence. It did not — as Hazlitt did — 
admire Napoleon; it rather advised England to let 
him alone and mind her own business — advice 
that England has never been very ready to take, and 
that was especially impracticable just then. The 
Examiner was to stand for independence and political 
reform at home, just when the frightened conserva- 
tism of England would hear nothing of reform. Its 
purposes were wise enough, but the temper in which 
it advocated them was sometimes a little sentimental, 
and usually not a little lofty. The magisterial assur- 
ance with which these young fellows — Hunt was 
twenty-four — rebuked and instructed statesmen 

212 



LEIGH HUNT 

and philosophers was certainly very superior. Hunt 
himself said, many years afterward, that he blushed 
at remembering the contrast between the simpleton 
he was and the sage he tried to seem. Yet assurance 
is a requisite of the editor, young or old; he must 
assume that virtue if he have it not. And Hunt's 
political writing in the Examiner will not, for the 
most part, strike the reader of to-day as especially 
dogmatic or impracticable. 

To Hunt, however, the politics of the Examiner 
was probably of less interest than its literature. 
He confesses that in those days he cared more for 
writing verses than he cared for the public good, 
and would have been glad to devote himself entirely 
to poetry and philosophy. As it was, he determined 
to produce in the Examiner, to use his own phrase, 
" a fusion of literary taste with all subjects whatever." 
But the fusion of literary taste with radical politics 
in the columns of a weekly newspaper is not always 
easy. In 1811, after three years of success with the 
Examiner, he set up beside it a quarterly journal 
called the Reflector, which might serve as a repository 
for longer and more distinctively literary articles 
and for poetry. The Reflector shone only for four 
numbers, and is not very brilliant. By far the 
best things in it are three essays by Lamb, On 
the Genius of Hogarth, On Shakespeare's Tragedies, 
On the Behavior of Married People, and his 

213 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

delightful Farewell to Tobacco. But among Hunt's 
own contributions are three or four of those chatty, 
sentimental papers on bookish subjects which form 
so large a part of his best work in later years. One 
of them, A Day by the Fire, is in his very best vein. 

It was in the Reflector, also, that Hunt printed his 
most ambitious attempt at poetry so far, a light 
satire entitled The Feast of the Poets. Like all his 
other early poetry, it is an echo ; indeed, as the title 
implies, it is almost a parody of Sir John Suckling's 
Session of the Poets. With a young man's audacity 
he deals his censure right and left, and doubtless, as 
he said, made almost every living poet and poetaster 
his enemy. Only four contemporaries are found 
worthy to sit at the feast of Apollo — Scott, Campbell, 
Southey, and Moore; and the god lectures each of 
these in turn very roundly for the deficiencies of his 
work. He is especially severe upon Scott, just then, 
it will be remembered, at the height of his poetic 
fame, with all the world reading Marmion and the 
Lady of the Lake. As for Coleridge and Words- 
worth, Apollo contemptuously shows them the door, 
laughing 

"between anger and mirth, 
And cried, 'Were there ever such asses on earth?'" 

and when " Billy" and "Sam" are slow to go, the 
god puts on all his splendors and fairly dazzles 

214 



LEIGH HUNT 

them out of his presence. But the verses, though 
amusing, are not so clever as Suckling's; their 
familiarity passes into vulgarity, and their critical 
verdicts show no real insight. Hunt afterward 
admitted that when he wrote them he had not read 
Wordsworth at all, and knew next to nothing of 
Coleridge. His attack on Scott was prompted by a 
dislike of a single word in one of Scott's notes on 
Dryden. Many years later he reworked the poem, 
taking out the offending passages; but the new 
version, though quite innocuous, is quite flat. It is 
curious to note that Hunt's poem furnished the sug- 
gestion for the plan of a much cleverer satire, Lowell's 
Fable for Critics. 

Meantime, fortune had been kind to Mr. Hunt. 
In 1809, emboldened by the success of the Exam- . 
iner, he ventured to marry and set up a modest home. 
For with all his shiftlessness he was not a Bohemian 
by nature, but liked a certain domestic snugness. 
His marriage at twenty-five terminated an engage- 
ment contracted when he was seventeen and the 
lady was thirteen years of age; and through all 
those eight years it would seem clear from his 
letters that, in spite of other passing fancies, he had 
been a devoted lover. Mrs. Hunt seems to have been 
a nice young person — not pretty, her son rather un- 
gallantly says, but with pretty tastes, for sketching, 
and water-colors, and embroidery, and a little poetry, 

215 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

and with a gift to read verses aloud quite remarkably 
well. It is evident from their letters that Hunt was 
anxious about her culture and during their engage- 
ment gave her a good deal of superior advice. One 
would think that during the fifty years of their 
married life she might have had opportunity to 
repay that obligation. Certainly we need not with- 
hold our sympathy from the woman who, in constant 
illness and with a large family of children, main- 
tained for half a century something like order and 
cheer in the household of a man of such varied 
ineptitude as Leigh Hunt. The two or three sayings 
recorded of her show that she must have had some 
imagination and some spirit — she said when first 
she saw a grove of olive trees in Italy that they 
"looked as if they only grew by moonlight," which 
is very pretty and very true; and when Byron said 
in her presence one day that Trelawney had been 
speaking against his morals, she quietly remarked, 
"It is the first time I ever heard of them." * 

But it was in February, 1813, that the first great 

^letter written in 1899, by Hunt's physician, Dr. George 
Bird, and recently published {The Nation (London) Vol. V, No. 8, 
page 724, Saturday, May 22, 1909). charges Mrs. Hunt not only 
with feebleness and fretf ulness, but with mendacity and intemper- 
ance, and ascribes to her influence most of Hunt's financial and 
other troubles. But I find it impossible to believe these charges 
in the face of Hunt's own statements in loving praise of his wife. 
His remarkable frankness never could conceal the weaknesses 
even of his nearest friends. 

2l6 



LEIGH HUNT 

piece of good luck befell Hunt ; he was sent to jail. 
The Examiner had from the start earned the reputa- 
tion of being a very outspoken journal. It had been 
prosecuted three times in two years, but had thus far 
escaped conviction, when in 1812 appeared the famous 
article on the Prince Regent. Hunt had criticised 
this "first gentleman of England" very freely in 
an article of the Reflector; but the paper in the 
Examiner was much more caustic. Apropos of some 
fulsome eulogies of the Prince in the Chronicle and 
Post, the Examiner broke loose after this fashion : — 

" What person unacquainted with the true state of 
the case would imagine, in reading these astound- 
ing eulogies, that this ' glory of the people ' was the 
subject of millions of shrugs and reproaches; that 
this ' protector of the arts ' had named a wretched 
foreigner his historical painter in disparagement or 
in ignorance of the merits of his own countrymen; 
that this 'Maecenas of the age' patronized not a 
single deserving writer; that this 'breather of elo- 
quence' could not say a dozen decent words, if we 
are to judge at least from what he said to his regi- 
ment on its embarkation for Portugal; that this 
1 conqueror of hearts ' was the disap pointer of hopes ; 
that this ' exciter of desire ' (Bravo, messieurs of 
the Post!), this Adonis in loveliness was a corpulent 
man of fifty, — in short, this delightful, blissful, wise, 

217 



v/ 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

pleasurable, honorable, virtuous, true, and immortal 
prince was a violater of his word, a libertine over 
head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic 
ties, the companion of gamblers, and demireps, a 
man who has just closed half a century without one 
single claim on the gratitude of his country or the 
respect of posterity.' ' 

All which, though he most potently and power- 
fully believed, Hunt should have seen it not 
honesty thus to have set down. Certainly no gov- 
ernment, then or now, that would save a shred of 
the divinity that doth hedge a king could let such 
language go unpunished. After some months of 
the law's delay Hunt and his brother John were 
both sentenced to two years' imprisonment, John in 
Clerkenwell, and Leigh in Horsemonger Lane. 

But the two years that followed were far from 
being the most unpleasant years of Hunt's life. He 
used to like to think that his imprisonment had 
impaired his health; but as he never had any very 
serious illness and lived to the ripe age of seventy- 
five, I think he was mistaken about that. After a few 
days he was given a pleasant suite of two rooms, one 
of which he proceeded to decorate with a wall- 
paper showing a lattice of roses climbing up the 
sides of the room, and blue sky and clouds on the 
ceiling, so that — like a good deal of his other work 

218 



LEIGH HUNT 

— it must have been all very pretty and in very 
bad taste. He brought into this room a choice 
library — largely made up of the Parnaso Italiano — 
with busts, and pictures, and his piano. His wife 
was with him, so that neither his literary nor his do- 
mestic life suffered any serious interruption. In 
fact, his eldest daughter and his longest poem were 
both born inside the jail. He had a garden, too, 
that furnished him with flowers of his own raising, 
and gave him about as much exercise and as much 
scenery as he ever really cared for. His friends 
were allowed to write him freely. He enjoyed 
enforced regularity of habit; he was boarded and 
lodged — perhaps for the only time in his life — 
without any anxiety from creditors; and with read- 
ing and writing and music and little dinners sent in 
by friends over the way, he made it a life of elegant 
retirement. On the whole, one thinks it was not a 
heavy price to pay for the privilege of writing a very 
telling libel and wearing a faint halo of martyrdom 
in the cause of civil liberty ever after. And of 
course it widened his reputation instantly. A good 
many people of influence, hitherto strangers to him, 
took occasion to manifest in various ways their sym- 
pathy with the persecuted champion of free speech. 
Not only old friends like the Lambs and Cowden 
Clarke came to visit him in prison, but Hazlitt came, 
and Bentham, and James Mill, and Haydon, and 

219 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Shelley, and Byron, and Moore, and hosts of lesser 
folk. And when he came out, young Keats, who had 
not yet met him, wrote a sonnet to commemorate the 
event. 

After his liberation Hunt felt that he might with 
some assurance of recognition turn his attention 
more exclusively to literature. Though he con- 
tinued to edit the Examiner with his brother until 
1 82 1, he did not venture any further dangerous 
meddling with politics, but made his paper more 
largely a journal of criticism and letters. He had 
published in 181 6 his most ambitious poem, The 
Story of Rimini, and three years later issued a 
collected edition of all his verse. He changed his 
residence — probably for reasons easily guessed — 
a half-dozen times in a half-dozen years ; but where- 
ever he was, his modest home was always open to 
his friends, and there were flowers and music and 
books and endless literary chat. All lovers of Keats 
will remember his pleasant sonnet 

"Brimful of the friendliness 
That in a little cottage I have found" — 

that little cottage in the Vale of Health where he 
wrote that other and better sonnet The Grasshopper 
and the Cricket and the characteristic lines Sleep 
and Poetry. Shelley, then living at Great Marlow, 
was through those years Hunt's close friend, and 
220 



LEIGH HUNT 

often came over to Hampstead to stay for days 
together. Byron condescended to call several 
times upon him. And Hunt's correspondence from 
1816 to 1820 gives glimpses of many other pleasant 
people of more or less note in the world of literature, 
some of them old friends and some of them new, that 
often looked in upon him. In those days he was at 
his best as a companion — sprightly, vivacious, quick- 
witted, with a certain courtly grace of manner. 
He was an excellent reader and mimic, told a story 
capitally, sang a simple song neatly, was ready with 
some pert remark or pretty fancy, and had a head 
full of superficial ideas that he had never taken much 
pains to assert. Charles Cowden Clarke, who knew 
a great many charming people in his day, declared 
that Hunt was " fascinating, animated, and winning, 
to a degree of which I have never seen the parallel " ; 
and the more impartial Hazlitt gives a picture of him 
in those days which seems as truthful as it is vivid : 

"Hunt has a fine vinous spirit and tropical blood 
in his veins; but he is better at his own table. He 
has a great flow of pleasantry and delightful animal 
spirits, but his hits do not tell like Lamb's; you 
cannot repeat them the next day. He requires not 
only to be appreciated, but to have a select circle 
of admirers and devotees, to feel himself quite at 
home. ... He manages an argument adroitly, 

221 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

is genteel and gallant, and has a set of by-phrases 
and quaint allusions always at hand to produce a 
laugh. If he has a fault, it is that he does not listen 
so well as he speaks, is impatient of interruption, and 
is fond of being looked ^up to without considering 
by whom. I believe, however, he has pretty well 
seen the folly of this." 

This fault, however, in spite of Hazlitt's generous 
judgment, I think Hunt had not then outgrown — 
nor ever did outgrow. He was ambitious of the 
fame of a literary patron. He defended in the 
Examiner the character and the writings of Shelley. 
He commended without reservation the early volumes 
of Keats, that everybody else neglected or derided. 
But, though his praise was very genuine, it was a 
positive injury to both Shelley and Keats; for it 
was given in such a tone of patronizing personal 
friendship as to make it possible for the hostile critics 
to represent these two great poets as merely the 
disciples and imitators of Mr. Leigh Hunt. The 
abusive articles on The Cockney School of Poets 
that defiled the pages of Blackwood's were provoked 
chiefly by Hunt, and their bitterest denunciations 
levelled at him. Yet I think that Hunt, while 
justly angered by them, took a secret satisfaction at 
being recognized as the head and sponsor of a new 
school of poets. It pleased him to believe that he 

222 



LEIGH HUNT 

was now suffering as the leader of a new and liberal 
movement in poetry as well as in politics. 

The cool reception given to his own verses even 
by the partial judgment of his friends ought to have 
shaken his conviction that he was himself a poet. 
Perhaps it did. At all events, after 1819, he aban- 
doned poetry for a number of years, and, indeed, 
never after attempted anything ambitious in verse. 
Late in that year 181 9, however, he tried his hand 
at something he had found he could do much better. 
He set up a paper made up mostly of essays 
written by himself with occasional contributions 
from others, and now and then some choice passages 
selectedjirom an old or little known author. The 
Indicator, as he called this periodical, was issued 
weekly, and ran for sixty-six numbers. It contains 
the best specimens of that familiar, chatty essay 
which Hunt had begun to write in the Reflector, and 
which he wrote better than any one else. He always 
looked back upon it with peculiar fondness, and 
loved to remember that such a paper had pleased 
Lamb, and another Shelley, and yet another Hazlitt. 

Through all these years, as always, Hunt was 
sadly in need of money. At some time not long after 
his liberation from prison Shelley had given him 
outright fourteen hundred pounds to extricate him 
from his debts; but, as he naively says, "I was not 
extricated, for I had not yet learned to be careful.' ' 

223 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Harassed by these difficulties, increased now by the 
needs of a growing family and the ill-health of his 
wife, and finding the strain upon his own energies 
caused by writing nearly the whole of the Examiner 
and the Indicator was getting unendurable, he gave 
. up both papers in 1821, and entered upon a new and 
very ill-starred enterprise. He accepted the invi- 
tation of Shelley, then in Italy, to join him and 
Byron there in the conduct of a new review, called 
% the Liberal, to be edited in Italy but printed by John 
Hunt in London. It is easy to see that the scheme 
must have been attractive to Hunt. He accounted 
Shelley his best friend — with good reason. He had 
longed for years to see Italy. And as for the pro- 
posed review, he thought the name of Byron, then at 
the height of his fame, would assure its success. But 
the plan was unlucky from the start. A week after 
his arrival, Shelley met his tragic death, and Hunt, 
practically penniless, was thrown upon the rather 
cool generosity of Byron. Byron was then living 
at Pisa with La Guiccioli and his very nondescript 
menage; and for a time the Hunts attempted to 
lodge under the same roof. But Byron found Hunt 
limp and helpless, Mrs. Hunt and the children 
vulgar; while Hunt found Byron exacting and 
penurious, and Mrs. Hunt would have nothing to do 
with his odious establishment. Obviously the rela- 
tions were impossible. The Liberal was started; 
224 



LEIGH HUNT 

but Byron, never having cared much for it, now 
cared nothing, and would contribute nothing save 
matter that Murray didn't dare to publish, and John 
Hunt got into prison again for publishing. The first 
three numbers contained Shelley's fine translation 
of Goethe's Walpurgis Nacht and some other 
beautiful fragments he had left, and Hazlitt's 
inimitable paper My First Acquaintance with Poets; 
but Hunt was left without further assistance, and 
with the fourth number the Liberal died. Not long 
after Byron started on his Greek expedition, and 
Hunt was left to shift for himself. He had not money 
enough to take his large family back to England, and 
stayed on two years more in Florence, supported — 
Heaven knows how ! Probably by his contributions 
to London papers, with generous contributions from 
Mrs. Shelley. Finally, in 1825, a London publisher 
advanced money enough to bring him back, and the 
homesick wanderer found himself again in the fields 
of his beloved Hampstead. 

This chapter of his life would, however, not have 
been so very unfortunate if it had ended there. But 
two years later, finding it necessary to furnish some- 
thing to the publisher, Colburn, in return for the 
money advanced him, Hunt sat down to write the 
story of his Italian life. He had intended at first to 
make it only that ; but as all the world was full just 
then of the fame of the great poet so recently dead, 
Q 225 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

he decided to alter and enlarge his book into an 
Account of Lord Byron and his Principal Contem- 
poraries. And as this universal grief and praise 
jarred a little on his own memories, he could not 
resist the temptation to give the world a picture of 
Lord Byron as he had known him. It was the worst 
mistake he ever made. In the preface to the first 
edition he confesses — or professes — that his first 
inclination on finishing the book was to put it in the 
fire; it would have been better for him had he fol- 
lowed that inclination. Not that the book is not 
true enough. Doubtless most of the things said in 
it about Byron are entirely true, — there were 
meannesses enough in Byron ; but it was not 
necessary to say them, and it was peculiarly unbecom- 
ing in Hunt to say them. For, however ungracious 
his temper may have been, Byron had certainly laid 
Hunt under very material obligation. By Hunt's 
own confession he had paid Hunt's passage to 
Italy, he had lodged him in his own palace, he had 
paid him at one time or another three or four hun- 
dred pounds, he had relinquished to him all share 
in the profits of the Liberal. After this Hunt should 
certainly not have felt at liberty to write a book full 
of petty chatter and scandal — that Byron dreaded 
getting fat, that Byron couldn't bear to see women 
eat, that Byron had no beard, and some women 
liked him better for it and some didn't like him so 
226 



LEIGH HUNT 

well, with infinitude of rubbish of that sort. And if 
Byron in his moments of vexation had said some 
nasty things to Hunt, Hunt now contrived to say 
some very nasty things in reply. To charge Byron 
with licentiousness was only to echo the charge of the 
world; but to say that Byron was stingily careful 
that his pleasures should not cost him too much, — 
that "no Englishman ever contrived to practise 
more rakery and more economy at one and the same 
time," — this was ingeniously cruel. And for Mr. 
Leigh Hunt to say that Lord Byron never liked to 
pay a debt, — that was effrontery rising to the sub- 
lime. No man is a hero to his valet ; but if the valet 
attempt to write the life of the hero, we know it is 
not the hero whose reputation is likely to suffer. It 
should be said to the credit of Hunt, however, that 
although he was at first very angry at the contemp- 
tuous criticism the book received and talked back 
badly in the preface to the second edition, he did 
afterward come to see his error and acknowledged 
it very handsomely in the Autobiography, twenty 
years later. 

The rest of his story may be passed over more 
briefly. He had yet thirty years of life, but after 
the publication of the Byron in 1828, he settled 
down to the work of magazinist and reviewer. 
In the next twenty-five years he set up several other 

227 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

periodicals, — eight of them, — for which he fur- 
nished most or all of the copy. His various books 
issued from time to time, The Seer, The Town, 
Table Talk, Men, Women, and Books, were made 
up of essays selected from these and his earlier 
journals. Although we think of him as an easy- 
going dilettante, he must sometimes have toiled 
terribly. For example, from September 4, 1830, 
to February 13, 1832, he ran a daily paper, and wrote 
it all himself. To be sure, it was of four pages only ; 
but if any one will propose to himself the task of writ- 
ing four small folio pages of print six days in a week, 
for a year and a half, he will not be surprised that the 
work, as Hunt says, "nearly killed me." But after 
about this time the sky began to brighten. He did 
not meddle with politics any longer; but after the 
Reform measures of 1832, politics seemed to be 
coming his way, and a good many younger men 
remembered his services to liberalism in the days 
when liberalism had been very unpopular. Even 
his old enemies softened to him. Blackwood's, 
the worst of them all, invited him to become a con- 
tributor and made amends for the hard words of 
fifteen years before in Wilson's famous sentence: 
"The animosities are mortal, but the humanities 
live forever." His own temper became more 
mellowed, his judgments broader and more urbane. 
The best of his old friends were gone, Shelley, 
228 



LEIGH HUNT 

Keats, Hazlitt, Lamb; but after about 1835 he 
enjoyed the acquaintance of a new generation of 
journalists and men of letters who all had a generous 
feeling for him and didn't take him too seriously. 
His best friends in this group were Macaulay, John 
Forster, and Carlyle. It is a little strange that the 
rugged sage of Chelsea, who had no patience with the 
aesthetic type and regarded such a man as Keats 
"a chosen vessel of hell," should have taken so 
kindly to his shiftless neighbor in the next street. 
Yet in spite of his contempt for Hunt's hugger- 
mugger housekeeping, it is evident that his rigor 
did thaw up before this vivacious little man, ''chat- 
ting idly melodious as bird on bough," who came in 
every other night to hear Mrs. Carlyle sing old Scotch 
songs and share the evening oatmeal. "A man 
of genius," says Carlyle, "in a very strict sense of 
that word ... of graceful fertility, of clearness, lov- 
ingness, truthfulness, of childlike open character." 
And, in turn, better or truer thing was never said of 
the real Thomas Carlyle than Leigh Hunt said: "I 
believe that what Mr. Carlyle loves better than his 
fault-finding with all its eloquence is the face of any 
human creature that looks suffering and loving and 
sincere." And though it has been both affirmed and 
denied, I have little doubt that Jane Welsh Carlyle 
is the Jenny of that most dainty and rememberable 
bit of verse Hunt ever wrote, — 

229 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

" Jenny kissed me when we met, 

Jumping from the chair she sat in; 
Time, you thief who love to get 

Sweets into your list, put that in: 
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad, 

Say that health and wealth have miss'd me, 
Say I'm growing old, but add, 
Jenny kiss'd me!" 

The last ten years of his life were passed in com- 
parative ease. It is true he never gained any mas- 
tery of the economies of life; but an annuity of a 
hundred and twenty pounds from the Shelley family 
and a pension of two hundred pounds from the 
Civil List made that mastery needless. His bland 
optimism grew on him in his declining years, and he 
diffused a mild glow of universal benevolence and 
hopefulness. He had made up all his old quarrels, 
forgotten all his old resentments. The one ungener- 
ous reference to him in those years, the too faithful 
portrait of Harold Skimpole in Dickens' Bleak 
House, it is said he alone of all readers did not 
recognize until it was pointed out to him. His 
fame, though far more lowly than the dreams of his 
youth had promised, was assured. Everybody 
knew him, and everybody liked him. There was 
hardly an artist or man of letters among his con- 
temporaries who had not some kindly word for the 
sprightly, bright-eyed old poet and critic who, in this 
present evil world, never lost his cheerful assurance 
230 



LEIGH HUNT 

that all things are turning out best for every- 
body. He died August 28, 1839, at the age of 
seventy-five. 

II 

After the lapse of half a century the man still 
keeps a pleasant place in our memory. He advo- 
cated good causes always, with however much un- 
wisdom; he always thought well of human nature, 
— too well, — and his easy, nonchalant cheerfulness 
has doubtless contributed something to the gladness 
of the world. On the other hand, it must be ad- 
mitted that it is impossible to have the highest 
respect either for his opinions or his temper. The 
great man cannot take life so easily as Leigh Hunt 
always took it. Optimism like his means that the 
optimist cannot or will not see life as it is, and feel 
all the weight of this unintelligible world. Hunt 
says that once or twice in his career he was troubled 
with hypochondria, which took the form of despon- 
dent wrestling with insoluble moral problems, the 
origin of evil being a nightmare that gave him 
especial agony. But he soon decided that the 
trouble was due to his liver; in his normal moods 
he was quite indifferent to such disquieting questions. 
The fundamental defect in Hunt's moral nature, 
I take it, was an almost entire lack of the sense of 
justice, in the relations of men to each other and to a 

231 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

Higher Power. It was a matter of familiar comment 
among his friends that he could not distinguish 
between a loan and a gift, and never thought of re- 
paying either one. A promissory note was an ever- 
lasting mystery to him. He says in the Life of 
Byron: "I have some peculiar notions on the sub- 
ject of money . . . which will be found to involve 
considerable differences of opinion with the commu- 
nity. . . . Among other things in which I differ 
in point of theory I have not that horror of being 
under obligation which is thought an essential 
refinement in money matters." Though he adds, 
with unconscious humor, that in practice he has often 
been obliged to conform to the usage of society. 
But he seemed to have just as little conception of 
obligation of every other sort. For lack of it, his 
ethics were a muddle of mawkish sentiment and 
lukewarm benevolence. He himself professed, in his 
own words, " to partake of none of the ordinary 
notions of merit and demerit with regard to any 
one," and thought himself "neither a bit better or 
worse than any other man." He who thinks so, 
or pretends to think so, disqualifies himself at once 
for any moral criticism or any just view of the great 
facts of human life. A theologian would say he had 
no sense of sin — and the theologian would be right. 
He had, instead of that, a dread and hatred of all 
pain, by whomsoever inflicted and for whatsoever 
232 



LEIGH HUNT 

reason. He disliked good old Izaak Walton be- 
cause he found cruel pleasure in catching little 
fishes; and he disliked the Jehovah of the Old 
Testament because He threatens to punish thieves, 
and murderers, and adulterers, and that sort of 
folk. To punishment he was mildly but firmly 
opposed ; it was a form of payment. Dante, though 
a great poet, he conceived to be "one of the most 
childishly mistaken men that ever lived, a bigoted 
and exasperated man," and he chastises what he 
calls the " infernal opinions " of the great Italian 
with much ardor. He was often concerned over 
the intemperate earnestness of good people, and in 
his earlier years wrote for the Examiner a series of 
papers on The Folly and Danger of Methodism 
that are rather amusing. Later in life, he prepared 
a little pocket volume — which John Forster got 
printed for him — containing his own creed and 
ritual, and entitled, Christianism, Belief and Un- 
belief Reconciled. The title may perhaps remind 
us of Carlyle's scornful proposal for a Heaven and 
Hell Amalgamation Society; but Hunt's method 
of reconciliation is very simple — you have only to 
believe what you like and disbelieve everything else, 
and the thing is done. All which, of course, only 
proves that Hunt had no conception how infinitely 
serious a thing is this human life of ours, and how 
perplexed and difficult, in the face of all its mystery, 

2 33 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

is any deep belief at all. He shared his friend 
Shelley's refusal of all law and penalty, and Shelley's 
confidence in the power of benevolent impulse; 
but he never felt Shelley's pathetic despair, or 
Shelley's tragic conviction that the world is out of 
joint. 

It was this very shallowness, both of opinion and 
feeling, joined with a certain bland assurance of 
manner, that made him often a difficult opponent 
in controversy. His critics charged him, and with 
some justice, of inability to understand the com- 
plexity of the questions he decided so jauntily, of a 
flippancy in the treatment of great passions that 
often passed into vulgarity, of a lack of reverence 
before great truths that often amounted to something 
like blasphemy. Yet he always took himself very 
seriously, and was sure, if possible, to assume the 
attitude of amiable but injured virtue. "If I have 
any two good qualities," he says complacently, 
"to set off against my defects, it is that I am not 
vindictive, and that I speak the truth." I think he 
did mean to speak the truth, as far as he saw it, and 
he was not vindictive; but he had a habit of mind 
far more irritating than vindictiveness — the habit 
of cheerful endurance of wrongs purely imaginary. 
The most utterly exasperating thing a man can do 
is to meekly forgive you for an injury you never com- 
mitted ; and this treatment Hunt sometimes accorded 
234 



LEIGH HUNT 

to his critics as well as to those people who were 
guilty of supposing he would pay the money he 
owed. 

The charge the enemies of Hunt used to make 
oftenest was that both in his life and in his writings 
he was an under-bred, vulgar person. "I wish," 
said Napier, "that Hunt would write a gentlemanly 
article for the Edinburgh" That was a charge 
likely to be made against anybody of pronounced 
democratic notions in the England of the early 
nineteenth century; and as made against Hunt, it 
was never exactly just. Yet Hunt's character 
always did lack distinction. There was nothing 
robust or severe about him. He was a great deal of 
a sentimentalist. He notes that the first words 
he heard in Italy were "fiore" and "donne" — 
flowers and ladies. In Florence he congratulated 
himself that he was lodged in the Via Belle Donne, 
till he found it was very nasty and very noisy. The 
one English prose-writer he admired most was 
Sterne; my uncle Toby he pronounced the ideal 
Christian, and Sterne himself the wisest man since 
Shakespeare. Any man who could say that must 
himself be something less than a gentleman. The 
truth is, sentimentalism is always vulgar. No man 
can live so largely among the mere prettinesses of 
life, indifferent to its noblest joys and noblest pains, 
without losing something of that power of vigorous 

235 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

and manly judgment upon which good taste — I had 
almost said good morals — depends. 

Ill 

If the critic is charged with paying too much atten- 
tion to Hunt the man, he may reply there is no 
better way of understanding Hunt the writer. For 
all his literary work shows the same charm and the 
same limitations that we have found in his character. 
As to his poetry, there is no need to say much. He 
was unable to portray or to appreciate genuine pas- 
sion ; he had little sympathy with the more strenuous 
forms of action and suffering. All the higher reaches 
of poetry were, therefore, inaccessible to him. That 
is the cause of his failure in the most ambitious of 
his poems, The Story of Rimini. To retell that 
story of Paolo and Francesca, told once for all with 
the simplicity and reticence of extremest pathos, is 
a daring venture for any poet; but for Leigh Hunt 
to attempt it was the sheerest folly. He tried to 
give to that most poignant of tragedies a certain 
gentle tenderness and grace; the results, at the su- 
preme points of the narrative, are nothing less than 
astounding. For example, Hunt's version of that 
scene where together the lovers read of Lancelot 
begins thus : — 

"So sat she fixed; and so observed was she 
Of one who at the door stood tenderly, 
236 



LEIGH HUNT 

Paulo, — who from a window seeing her 

Go straight across the lawn, and guessing where, 

Had thought she was in tears, and found, that day, 

His usual efforts vain to keep away. 

'May I come in ?' said he: — it made her start — 

That smiling voice ; she colored, pressed her heart 

A moment, as for breath, and then with free 

And usual tone said, 'O yes, certainly.'" 

How any human being could first read his Dante and 
then write such lines as these, is more than I can 
comprehend. It is one of the most incredible lapses 
into pure banality in English verse. And there are 
other passages almost as bad. Wherever the feeling 
should be intense and concentrated, he dilutes it 
into sentimental commonplace. As Laertes says in 
the play — 

"Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, 
He turns to favor and to prettiness." 

The only parts of the poem, therefore, that have 
any merits are the unessential parts, descriptive and 
decorative — gardens and processions, and that 
sort of thing. The critics professed to be scandal- 
ized by the immorality of the poem; which was 
absurd, especially so in a public that could accept 
with only mild and half-admiring expostulation 
Byron's worst verses. Indeed, Hunt had changed 
the story a little so that, as he said, he might teach 
a useful lesson as to the fatal results, not of passion 

237 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

in the lovers, but of deceit in the elder brother. The 
poem is moral enough; but it does show instances 
of a curious sort of offence against good taste found 
too often in all Hunt's writing, prose as well as 
verse. Like Sterne, whom he admired so much, 
he had a kind of indelicate delicacy, an affectation 
of innocence, that often passed into mawkishness 
and sometimes into pruriency. 

The most important thing, however, to be said 
about the Story of Rimini is that it was the first 
considerable attempt in the nineteenth century to 
revive the rhyming ten-syllable couplet in an essen- 
tially new form. The lines are run on, the pauses 
are varied, the rigidity of the couplet is entirely 
broken up. Hunt said that he owed the suggestion 
of the verse to Dryden; it is obvious, too, that 
he was influenced by Chaucer, whose fluency and 
naivete he tried to reproduce. In the preface to the 
collected edition of his poems, issued in 1832, he 
remarks : " It seems to me that, beautiful as are the 
compositions which the English language possesses 
in the heroic couplet, both by deceased and living 
writers, it remains for some poet hereafter to per- 
fect the versification by making a just compromise 
between the inharmonious freedom of our old poets 
in general and the regularity of Dryden ; who, noble 
as his management of it is, beats after all too much 
upon the rhyme." This was what Hunt attempted 

238 



LEIGH HUNT 

to do. His attempt was not very successful ; it was 
impossible it should be with a story of intense passion 
like the Rimini. But he must be given the credit 
of being the first to see and state the possibilities 
of this essentially new metrical form. Keats, who 
unquestionably learned it from Hunt, used it im- 
mediately in all his early verses, and with signal 
success, a little later, in the Lamia; and several 
more recent poets — notably William Morris — have 
proved how well it is adapted to easy, deliberate, 
highly decorated narrative poetry. 

Some of Hunt's other and less pretentious narrative 
poems, like the Hero and Leander, are better than 
the Rimini; but in them all he is at his best when 
passion and action are at a mimimum, and he can 
find opportunity for the play of a leisurely fancy. 
Among English poets his favorite was Spenser, in 
whose land of dreams there is no passion and no 
real action. Throughout his work there are passages 
of genuinely beautiful description, and occasionally 
— not often — single lines of startling beauty of 
image. But, on the other hand, he had a weakness 
for sentimental and affected epithet, — which he very 
unfortunately imparted to Keats, — and his taste is 
never quite firm and sure. From his tempera- 
ment and surroundings one might have expected 
him to write more verse like the charming rondeau 
quoted just now, Jenny Kissed Me, short occa- 

239 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

sional lyrics of love, or compliment, or playful 
satire. But he did not. His muse was too garru- 
lous and gossiping for that. His satire lacks point; 
his humor lacks sparkle ; his line lacks finish. Only 
three of his shorter poems are now really alive, and 
in each of these some serious feeling gives sincerity 
and restraint to the phrase: the Abou ben Adhem, 
his one familiar poem; the sonnet on the Nile, his 
one noble poem; and the Lines to T. L. H., Six 
Years Old, during a Sickness, beginning 

"Sleep breathes at last from out thee, 
My little patient boy." 

This last poem is the best example of the character- 
istic gentleness of Hunt, for once expressing itself 
without any false note. It is enough to prove that 
there was a genuine, if slender, vein of poetry in 
the man. Of course T. L. H. is his son Thornton. 
For Hunt as critic, there is much more to be said. 
He had the first qualification of the critic, he was a 
lover of books. Human life interested him chiefly 
as stuff to be made up into literature. That was one 
reason why he could not be a poet — he did not like 
life at first hand. With reference to nature, also, he 
had much the same feeling. It was Charles James 
Fox, I believe, who once said, "There is only one 
thing in life more pleasant than to lie under an apple 
tree in June with a book ; and that is to lie under an 
240 



LEIGH HUNT 

apple tree in June without a book." Hunt would 
always have wished the book. Indeed he seemed to 
care for only so much of nature as might serve for 
pleasant setting for his reading; he had no use for 
the solitudes and solemnities. No doubt this liking 
to look at all things through the spectacles of books 
may have deprived him of that freshness of view 
which comes from bringing everything to the test 
of life ; but, at all events, it gave to his criticism the 
zest of eager personal interest. He is in love with 
his theme. He smacks his lips over some delicious 
passage of verse as if taste were to him literally a 
delight of sense. And he has in rather unusual 
degree the gift to impart this delight to the reader. 
Some paragraphs of his on Spenser, for example, are 
among the best things ever said of Spenser. 

His criticism is doubtless rambling and discur- 
sive. He selects favorite passages and flits from 
flower to flower. His appreciation, moreover, was 
limited. He liked beauty, grace, luxuriance, repose ; 
strenuous action, passion, anything rugged or sub- 
lime disconcerted him. In style he was inclined to 
prefer the ornate to the chaste, captivating beauty 
of form rather than a more severe or interior charm. 
Naturally, therefore, he was a better critic of manner 
than of matter, of poetry than of prose. Further- 
more, as he had no constructive ability himself, 
so he had little sense of it in others. He takes his 
s 241 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

literature piecemeal, and does not appreciate the 
larger, more structural virtues of a great work of 
literary art. Similarly, he is not always able to per- 
ceive rightly the essential, distinguishing qualities 
of an author's genius, or to see how the particular 
excellences he points out so well are related to the 
author's personality. For example, he says of the 
poet he ought to have known best, Shelley, that if he 
had lived, he would have been the greatest drama- 
tist since Shakespeare. This is about as mistaken a 
verdict as could possibly be pronounced on a genius 
so thoroughly self-involved and lyrical as Shelley's. 
But on the same page, speaking of Shelley's style, 
Hunt says: "Nobody has a style so orphic and pri- 
meval. His page is full of mountains, seas, and 
skies, of light and darkness and the seasons and all 
the elements of our being, as if Nature herself had 
written it." Such a statement, though somewhat 
over-rhetorical, certainly is admirably suggestive of 
Shelley's manner; but Hunt should have seen that 
this "orphic and primeval" style could never belong 
to a dramatist; it is the style of the lyrist, whose 
soul seems to lie open to every breath of inspiration 
"that under heaven is blown." So Hunt says of 
Keats that, had he lived, "he would doubtless have 
written in the vein of Hyperion," rising superior to 
the " languishments of love" that made the Eve of 
St. Agnes so over-rich and languorous. But Hunt, 

242 



LEIGH HUNT 

who knew the whole course of Keats' life, from 
its beginning to its end, ought to have remembered 
that all his latest work, the Lamia, the Eve of 
St. Mark, the La Belle Dame sans Merci, showed 
no tendency to the development of a classic and 
chastened imagination, but rather a preference for 
the rich and melancholy studies of mediaevalism. 
His genius, thoroughly romantic, would in all prob- 
ability, like that of Rossetti, have grown more and 
more in love with the mystic half-lights of the middle 



But Hunt's detached critical remarks are almost 
always incisive and illuminating. Thus he says 
of Milton, "He had not that faith in things that 
Homer and Dante had, apart from the intervention 
of words;" that is excellent as a suggestion of the 
mode of Milton's imagination when compared with 
that of the two other great epic poets. He works 
himself into a rage over the doctrines of Dante's 
poem, declaring it (in a theological point of view) no 
better than the dream of a hypochondriac savage; 
yet he was acutely sensitive to the dramatic power of 
Dante, and you will look far to find a better expres- 
sion of the wonderful sense of reality above the 
actual, the dream vividness of Dante, than Hunt 
gives in these few words: — 

"Whatever he paints he throws, as it were, upon 
its own powers; as though an artist should draw 

243 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

figures that started into life and proceeded to action 
for themselves, frightening their creator. Every 
action, word, and look of these creatures becomes 
full of sensibility and suggestion. The invisible 
is at the back of the visible; darkness becomes pal- 
pable; silence describes a character, nay, forms the 
most striking part of a story ; a word acts as a flash 
of lightning, which displays some gloomy neighbor- 
hood, where a tower is standing with dreadful faces 
at the windows ; or where at your feet, full of eternal 
voices, one abyss is beheld dropping out of another 
in the lurid light of torment. . . . Dante has the 
minute probabilities of a Defoe in the midst of the 
loftiest poetry." 

Hunt's critical writing, however, is not all desultory 
and empirical. His contributions to literary theory 
are by no means insignificant. He had considerable 
power of analysis and definition, and he had thought 
more carefully upon the grounds of literary excel- 
lence than upon any other subject. He took espe- 
cial interest in the essential nature and the technique 
of poetry. The preface to the volume of 1832, 
from which I just now quoted his statement as to the 
modification of the heroic couplet, contains an ad- 
mirable discussion of the essentials of poetic matter 
and form; while his fuller treatment of the subject, 
ten years later, in the essay entitled What is 
Poetry ? is, on the whole, as satisfactory an answer 
244 



LEIGH HUNT 

to that difficult question as any more recent writer 
has been able to give us. To be sure, Hunt does not 
delve very deeply in his subject, and he is afraid of an 
exhaustive treatment — for which we may be thank- 
ful; but the essay is full of the most acute and dis- 
criminating remark. His discussion of the value 
of musical sensibility in verse, of the difference 
between smoothness and sweetness, of the effect of 
variety in accent, of alliteration and assonance, his 
distinction between the natural and the prosaic, — 
which very neatly punctures the fallacy in Words- 
worth's famous preface, — these, among other pas- 
sages, may be cited in proof of the delicacy and jus- 
tice of his taste when dealing with general principles. 
The whole paper is very suggestive; and it is very 
entertaining. It serves as an introduction to the 
volume he called Imagination and Fancy, the rest 
of the book being made up of a body of selections 
from our poetry illustrating the principles of the essay 
with a running comment. It was natural for Hunt 
to consider the imagination as the faculty that em- 
bellishes and interprets, rather than in its higher 
creative functions; indeed, it was almost inevitable 
he should do so, if he was to exhibit it in brief selec- 
tions. He is, therefore, led to lay perhaps undue 
stress upon the imagery and music of poetry as com- 
pared with its higher values of thought and feeling. 
Yet, on the whole, I do not know any volume better 

245 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

fitted to guide and stimulate a growing taste; there 
is hardly anything better to put into the hands of a 
young student of poetry. A companion volume, 
made up in the same way, illustrating wit and hu- 
mor, is almost as good. Both books were written 
after Hunt was sixty years old; it is to be regretted 
that he did not live to carry out his purpose of add- 
ing to these volumes three more, treating respec- 
tively of action and passion, of contemplation, and 
of song. For his taste grew steadily broader and 
sounder, and in his later years he lived to appreciate 
very justly authors — Wordsworth and Scott, for 
example — that in his youth he had sadly misjudged. 
But far the greater part of Hunt's work was in the 
fornf of the short periodical essay. He had fallen in 
love, as we have seen, with the eighteenth-century 
essayists while in his early teens ; and his first purely 
literary venture, — if we except the juvenile poems, — 
the Reflector, issued in 1810, was modelled closely 
upon Addison and Goldsmith. Here, again, I think 
Hunt may be credited with rejuvenating an old 
literary form. For the Reflector was the first really 
successful attempt in the nineteenth century to 
revive the light periodical essay, after its ponderous 
mishandling by Johnson in the Rambler and Idler. 
We shall remember that Hunt's work of this kind 
preceded that of Lamb and Hazlitt ; indeed it was in 
periodicals set up by Hunt that both Lamb and Haz- 

246 



LEIGH HUNT 

litt found a medium for the publication of some of 
their best work. When, a little later, the magazines 
began to appear, there was a demand for this sort of 
writing — as there has been ever since. We, perhaps, 
in the twentieth century, think ourselves a little too 
earnest for this kind of literature; yet if any man 
can write it as well, for example, as Thackeray wrote 
it in his Roundabout Papers, he will be sure of 
readers to-day, if not of fame to-morrow. But no 
kind of writing above mere journalism is more 
ephemeral. Not only the Rambler and the Idler, but 
the Bee and the Citizen of the World, and even the 
Taller and the Spectator, it is to be feared, now repose 
undisturbed upon the top shelves; and Hunt's Indi- 
cators and Companions have doubtless joined them 
there. It is only some remarkable dexterity of style 
or some unique humor or force of personality that 
can keep such work from oblivion. Hunt had neither 
of these qualifications. His gossiping papers are 
very pleasant reading, if you have time on your 
hands; but they have no compelling charm. After 
all we have been told of the fascinating converse of 
the man, we are surprised to find his wit has so little 
keenness, and his humor is only often a playful, half- 
patronizing familiarity. Then, again, he is a little 
too bookish. More than half his papers are nothing 
but echoes of his reading — old stories retold, bits 
of legend or romance, scraps from his favorite au- 

247 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

thors. And even those drawn directly from the life 
of the street or the fields seem to lack that humorous 
observation of men and things at first hand that makes 
the papers of Steele, for example, so racy. If Hunt 
is writing on coaches, or May-day or London fog, 
he is sure to tell you what the poets and historians 
think about it, and may give you a score of quota- 
tions in three pages. Nor has Hunt the power to 
show by some sudden flash of imagination the subtle 
connection of the simplest things with the most seri- 
ous, as Lamb can do, or to pass almost insensibly 
on any familiar occasion into a train of lofty and sol- 
emn revery, as Hazlitt so frequently does. A com- 
parison of his work in this respect with Hazlitt' s will 
show how inferior is Hunt's. He never has Hazlitt's 
marvellous acuteness of analysis; he never has 
Hazlitt's serious, half-mournful, but large and in- 
spiring tone of reflection, Hazlitt's imagination and 
passion, Hazlitt's rhythm and distinction of manner. 
Yet, after all, it is ungenerous to find fault with a 
man for not doing better what he has done so well. 
For, leaving out his second-hand stories, and admit- 
ting that his humor is often insipid and his sentiment 
wilted, we could still select from Hunt's writing a 
goodly volume of essays hard to surpass in their kind. 
They are made up of trifles; but then life is made 
up of trifles. We need not withhold some cordial 
liking from that kind of literature which does not 
248 



LEIGH HUNT 

attempt to arouse or inspire, but rather to express the 
familiar pleasures that cheer, and the familiar trials 
that chasten, the hours of every day. Hunt doesn't 
show us new things, or even new meanings in the old 
things. He talks with us as we talk with each other 
around the fire on winter evenings, of our habits, our 
likings, our prejudices, our tasks, our books, our 
clothes; about taxes or the weather; about the last 
play we have seen or the last pretty girl we have met, 
— for Hunt at sixty, with nine children, was still a 
youngster, — or, as the evening wears and our mood 
grows a shade more serious, about our comforts, 
our plans, our fancies, our friends, and — for Hunt 
was always more a benedict than a bachelor — about 
all the snug domesticities of home. He makes no 
exactions upon your thought, and he seldom invades 
your emotions beyond that outer circle friends may 
approach but may not cross. Such papers do not 
rank very high as literature. One has a comfortable 
feeling that he can leave them alone, if he likes, 
without endangering his reputation as a well-read 
man. Yet you may turn over the pages of cur best 
magazines of to-day without finding much editorial 
writing that, for interest, might not well be exchanged 
for these little papers of Leigh Hunt. 

His name not unfitly closes the short list of writers 
considered in this volume. His career was longer 
than that of any other, for his first book appeared in 

249 



A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 

1801 and his last in 1855. Perhaps in this long life 
he had neither done nor suffered quite so much as he 
himself, when near its close, was inclined to believe. 
He was not of the stuff that scorns delights and lives 
laborious days. He had solved no problems, in- 
spired no heroisms, written no masterpieces. But he 
did something in early life for the cause of civil 
liberty; he did more, I think, in his later years to 
quicken and widen the love of good literature. And 
through all that half-century, by three generations of 
friends, he was known as a genial, cheery man, who 
never felt the tedium of life, was hopeful under all 
its discouragements, impatient of all harshness, fond 
of all gentle and beautiful things. Doubtless he was 
too self-indulgent to be the ideal philanthropist; yet 
we may, with no fulsome exaggeration, accord to him 
the praise he himself would most have coveted, 
phrased in his own best words : — 

"Write me as one who loved his fellow-men." 



250 



Essays on Modern Novelists 
By WILLIAM LYON PHELPS, 

M.A. Harvard, Ph.D. Yale ; formerly Instructor in English at 
Harvard ; Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale. 

Ready in January, igio 

Every reader of contemporary literature has found 
at some time or other the need for critical guidance 
in estimating the work of men still living. Critics 
are rarely abreast of the time and there is nothing 
so difficult to obtain as authoritative information on 
events of the day. For this reason the brilliant book 
in which Professor Phelps has devoted himself to the 
writings of modern novelists will be of inestimable 
service to all who desire to form a really sound 
judgment upon the literature of the day. The 
writers discussed by Professor Phelps are William 
De Morgan, Thomas Hardy, William Dean Howells, 
Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Mark Twain, Henryk Sienkie- 
wicz, Hermann Sudermann, Alfred Ollivant, Robert 
Louis Stevenson, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Rudyard 
Kipling and the author of "Lorna Doone." 
Of these writers Professor Phelps gives illuminating 
criticisms, setting forth their essential qualities. 
Many of them are still looking to the future more 
than to the past, and all of them are the men and 
women who have created the literature of the period. 
The work also contains two essays, on " Novels as a 
University Study" and "The Teacher's Attitude 
toward Contemporary Literature," and concludes 
with a comprehensive bibliography and appendix. 



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